AI is making creator IP the most valuable and most vulnerable asset in media today.

I'm CEO and founder of TrueRights. We're building a digital rights platform that helps talent better own their digital presence. I came from the influencer world, eight years in influencer marketing.

The path before that was an unexpected one. I worked at UBS in wealth management. I was 17. My dad wanted me to go to university, very traditional path. I was in a McDonald's talking to him about how I didn't want to. Someone overheard, who had just launched the UBS apprenticeship programme. She said she liked the way I was speaking to my dad and that I showed the characteristics they wanted on the apprenticeship. Six interviews and six weeks later I was at UBS. Three and a half years advising ultra-high-net-worth clients. As a 19-year-old, shaven-faced, the optics were not ideal; clients were probably thinking this guy doesn't even know how to spend his own money, why is he spending mine? It made me grow up quickly.

A friend, Ben Jeffries (founder and CEO of Influencer), was building the business. The transitional period from finance to influencer marketing felt right. I became employee number three at Influencer, account executive, jack of all trades.

We did studies and tests at TrueRights where we looked at the contractual terms agreed between brands and talent, then monitored whether the content was used in accordance with those terms. Six out of ten digital campaigns breached the rights. I was surprised it was that high. On some beta-partner studies the figure was 80%.

The reason isn't deliberate. It's unknowing. There aren't tools to help any stakeholder (brand or talent) understand how content should be used once rights have been bought. Brands haven't got anywhere to consolidate the rights. I spoke to global brands about how they hold their rights data. The answer was whoever did the deal with the talent will have the contract in their email. If we need it, we'll ask them to dig into their inbox. That isn't an effective system. There's a basic problem of rights management; there's also a bigger problem of brands using content on the wrong platforms, for the wrong period, in the wrong markets, because the stipulations weren't tracked. AI is opening up new ways to extend content into other markets and other applications; many brands are doing it, but not above board, because they haven't paid for the rights to use the content in that way.

Many talent agencies now price usage rights at the very highest possible level, on the off chance that the brand misuses the content or uses it to the full extent of what's permitted. Brands end up paying a premium just because they haven't been able to dictate exactly where they'll use the content and because there's a real risk of misuse. The market is not fair to either side.

A brand running a year-long campaign with an agency might buy 300 pieces of content. In any given month or two-month flight, eight to thirty pieces might run. The rights have been bought for 300. The waste is enormous because there's no way to execute usage rights more granularly. I see us getting into the agree upfront, then execute later model, where the brand checks organic performance before amplifying paid, and only licenses the pieces that have earned the spend.

There's going to be a lot more white-glove service around usage rights. The rights chain matters as much as the supply chain. Brands and platforms in the AI era will need to confidently say a piece of content has been licensed in an authorised manner.

AI has made it obvious that someone's image can be used in content without their authorisation. Suddenly there's a real question around the talent's rights in general: IP rights, AI rights, content rights, all encompassing. The growth of the influencer space has contributed too, and the way brands engage with influencers. Big brands are encouraging their teams and agencies to be more rights-conscious from day one. There is a cultural change, which is real.

The model that's right is auditor. Look at PRS in the royalty music market, mediating fulfilment of contracts and distribution of funds. We'll see a similar pattern in the content world: someone in the middle who mediates between brands and talent. That auditor function could extend to financial payments, where there's a real issue today with talent being paid late because of the way IO terms cascade from brand to agency to talent.

Working in partnerships I saw social platforms consistently building creator packages designed to lift media spend from advertisers. Buying rights for three-month platform usage was the common thread. Two realisations: rights are more important than the content itself, and IP in the content is enormous.

TikTok then told me about TikTok Symphony, their AI solution. You can drop a product URL in and it produces a creative brief, runs the brief through video generation, throws an avatar in. End-to-end agency service. They asked me how IP could be put into that content. They want to do it ethically; that was a strong indicator from TikTok that the market is heading toward standards.

The Wallet consolidates the creator's training data. Their intellectual property isn't just their image any more. It's their mannerisms, personality, traits, height, weight, ethnicity, build. Terry Crews described it as intellectual personality rather than property, which is the right reframe. The Wallet structures and labels the data so we can share it to generative-AI tools in a way that's compatible with how those tools work, and is succinct (we have to keep the data consistent so it doesn't include both a current image and a 10-year-old one).

The Stamp underpins the trust layer. We work with C2PA (the content credentials and content provenance standard), embedding metadata and licensing information into the manifest. Short licensing terms, dates, rights holders, market use, and the AI rights. If a talent doesn't want their content to train other tools, we embed that. We can communicate with the partner about the purpose of the content and provide reassurance about how it gets used. We can then monitor that use. We've run tests with TikTok where features embedded in the Stamp came back through the platform, which means for the first time we can talk to these platforms in real time about how the IP is being misused.

Usage clauses in contracts. A partner gave us 30 contracts they had for their talent. We looked at contracts from brands, agencies, influencer agencies, networks, and media. Every single clause was inconsistent. Some contracts even had multiple term-and-duration dates: we can use this for three months organically, and two paragraphs later we can use this for two years should we wish. The brand will default to the term that benefits it most, which is understandable. The systematic answer is standardisation.

We're trying to help talent have a clause that's standardised, covering markets, term, duration, channels, formats, exclusivity, and is compatible with brands. Both parties then know how they should be using it moving forward.

There's a Gymshark legal matter in the press at the moment, less about misuse than about digital rights management between the parties. A talent they stopped working with then went and worked with a competitor (an exclusive partner of theirs). Without a digital rights platform, neither party has a clear, shared, accessible view of exclusivity or competitor clauses to make sure they aren't going into a contract they shouldn't be. It's a public example of where talent didn't have the tools to understand what their own contract said. Brands and talent will start to scrutinise misuse of rights, of competitor clauses, and of exclusivity, because they want to be getting their worth.

My cousin is in the top 1% of fantasy artists globally. He does Magic: The Gathering cards, the World of Warcraft art, the Dungeons & Dragons book covers. His paranoia is that people like him could become defunct because AI takes the ideas and the IP and enables other people to create replicants. If you put as much work into something as he does, and it's taken without permission, that is theft. The tools themselves are amazing facilitators of the next evolution of content. The wish is that they had been built ethically.

Two things. You can't ignore AI; learning anything around AI develops your skills and competencies, whether operational, content amplification, or creative. Second, be creative. Marketing is an attention game: how do we earn attention for this period of time, and that's typically driven by engagement and entertainment, both of which come from creative work.