In this episode, we’re joined by Ben Woollams, CEO and founder of True Rights – a platform reshaping how digital rights are managed in marketing. Ben shares his fascinating journey from UBS to influencer marketing, and how his experience led him to tackle one of the industry’s biggest blind spots: IP mismanagement in the creator economy.
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Welcome to the Business of Marketing podcast recorded live at Advertising Week Europe. Today I have the absolute pleasure of welcoming Ben Willems, CEO of TrueRise. Hi Ben, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Ben, it’d be really great for those who are unfamiliar with you and your business, just to give us an example in terms of the problems that you’re solving and perhaps also introduce yourself to an extent.
Yeah, for sure. Thanks, John. So CEO and founder of TrueRise, as you mentioned. And we’re building a digital rights platform that helps talent better own their digital presence. I came from the influencer world, did eight years in influencer marketing. And one thing I saw was that there’s a big dependency on creators, their IP, how they can fit into marketing plans and how they can work with brands. But there aren’t many tools that allow them to establish how and where their IP is being used. And, you know, a bit of a spoiler, but with the proliferation of AI, what does that then look like moving forward to have more control over their IP? Because as you’ve seen, deep fakes and everything else is starting to take advantage of that.
Yeah, something else that I’m interested in, and let’s just touch on now, is your career journey. Looking on your LinkedIn, I see that you originally started out within financial services. So how did you move from there to what you’re doing today?
It was a bit of a shift, as you can imagine. So I worked at UBS, I was in wealth management, and that was a crazy story in itself. I was 17, you know, my dad wanted me to go to university. He was very traditional. You go to school, you get your A-levels, you get a university degree, work, etc. And I was in a McDonald’s of all places, talking to my dad about how I didn’t want to go to university. Next thing I know is that someone turned around who had just launched the UBS grad program for the apprentices and basically said she was liking the way that I was speaking to my old man and that I showed the characteristics of everyone they wanted to bring on board. And six interviews later, and six weeks later, I was joining UBS. I did that for three and a half years. But as you can imagine, as a 19-year-old, you know, shaven face, very young, trying to advise ultra high net worth clients on how to invest their money, it doesn’t give the right image. And I think there was even points where clients were probably thinking that, you know, this guy doesn’t even know how to spend his own money. Why is he spending mine? And I did that for three and a half years. It was very interesting. It made me grow up very quickly, I think. And a friend of mine, Ben Jeffries, who is the CEO and founder of a company called Influencer, he was launching Influencer at the time. And so we got speaking and lo and behold, there was a transitional period from finance into influencer marketing because it was up and coming. It was very exciting. And the stars kind of aligned and it felt like a good move. And at that point, I kind of became account exec and jack of all trades and joined as number three for Influencer.
Wow.
Yeah. And hey, look, you’re not a marketer by trade, but with TrueRise obviously touches on marketing and the marketing world on a daily basis. What’s your perspective in terms of the relationship between rights management and brand values?
I think it’s a facilitator. I think the way I see it is we want rights to be licensed effectively to allow marketers to go and brands to go and build on these great creative ideas, but all above board. I think you see nowadays, and we’re not just talking about talent IP, IP has become such a powerful feature for any brand, for any talent, for anyone else really in terms of building resonance and credibility in a certain space. So how do we provide a framework really that facilitates that to be more creative, to do more, to be more ambitious and everything else in between? So for us, it’s really about facilitation.
Yeah. I mean, on your website and where I’ve read online, you also make a claim, which I think is great, which is you say that six out of 10 digital campaigns breach talent usage rights. That’s obviously a huge statistic. Why do you think this is happening and what are the implications for marketing teams?
Well, the first thing I’d say is I think it’s unknowingly happening because I don’t think there are any tools out there that help any stakeholder, be it brand or talent, to understand how they should be using that content when they’ve bought the rights. And so we did some studies and sometests at TrueRise that allowed us to basically look at the terms that had been agreed, see how they were being used, and then monitor whether or not they’d been used in accordance with the terms that had been outlined. And it was quite surprising it was that high, if I was honest with you. I didn’t quite think it was that bad. But I think by and large is that brands haven’t got anywhere they can consolidate these rights.
And so when I spoke to a few different brands, and I won’t name any because I don’t want to put them in any trouble, but big, big, big, big global brands about how they consolidate their rights. And don’t forget here, brands are working with thousands of influencers at a time, some of these big kind of global brands and presences. And their answer was, whoever dealt with the talent will have a contract in their email, and within that contract, they will have the rights outlined. So if we need to go and find them, we will ask that person to go and dig into their emails to find the contract. And that’s if we find it, we can pass it over. And you thought, oh wow, well firstly, it’s not effective. And so there’s a solution to be made around just management of rights in the first instance.
But secondly, the other side of it is how do brands get more out of using this right? So what we were seeing is that the brands are using content on the wrong platforms for the wrong period of time, maybe in the wrong markets. These are all things that weren’t stipulated and they’re misusing. But why can’t they, especially with AI and new features that allow content to be explored or exhausted a little bit more, why can’t they be taking content and using it in other markets? Well, it comes down to the points of rights. And so a lot of them were doing that, but just not doing it ethically or above board. And so they were misusing content because they hadn’t paid for the rights to use content in that way.
Yeah, I mean, certainly timeline is one thing that people will be conscious of. You know, it may be that they just licensed an image as an example for a year or a couple of years. And then after that, it’s still online. In essence, it’s still technically being used. It’s still being used, exactly, yeah. And too many people do not have systems, you know, small businesses certainly not going to have systems in place to better monitor and say, well, actually, it’s now the point to take it down. And perhaps at the start, they didn’t do like a full buyout, for instance, so they could have that longevity or unlimited use or better adapt it for other formats.
And it’s interesting because it actually now hinders brands to an extent. Because when I spoke to a lot of talent agencies, they said that they now price usage of contents and licensing rights at the very highest it can be off the off chance that it gets misused or if brands use it fully to the scope that they are intending to. And so what you’re seeing is brands are now having to pay a premium just because they aren’t dictating exactly where they’re going to use it. And there’s also a risk of misusing it. So you kind of have this market that is not fair for either side.
Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting that they, I guess, the in-between, the conduit, the platform in the middle. And if you think about also how the purpose of why brands work with talents to an extent and why they create all this content is a lot of it’s for ads, right? A lot of it’s for how do we, and what’s the purpose of ads? Getting a good ROI. And so you go through this kind of methodical way of thinking with, you know, they want to use talent to get better performance and they want to license rights effectively, but there’s no standardization, there’s no best practice, everyone’s misguided on costs and ways of using it. That means that ROI is probably damaged quite significantly. I reckon actually influence marketing in terms of talent performance can exceed already where it is quite significantly if this kind of digital rights management piece comes into play.
Sure. I mean, that also touches on, you know, it’s a nice segue, I guess, into my next question, which is around how does bad rights management affect brand trust, campaign ROI, which you’ve kind of touched on, and ultimately relationships with agencies or other third parties? Yeah, I think it’s been an interesting space. I think in general, brands have a lot of the power in the relationship, naturally, given the presence they have, the budgets and everything else around it. And so I think what we’re trying to do here is set a standardization within a marketplace to allow both sides to understand performance a little bit better.
As I said to you earlier, you know, when you ask a talent to actually price up the usage rights, it’s very subjective. And if I have 10,000 followers and you have 20,000 followers, I might even charge more than you charge just because there’s no rules as dumb, there’s no best practice for it and there’s no guidance as well. And so the first instance is it’s very hard for a brand to dictate media budgets, performance, anything else along those lines, because they’ve never had a way of pricing it effectively. And so that is causing a bit of an issue in general. And I think if you now look at how much content is being created, you know, when I was working in the influencer agency kind of realm, it started very transactional.I pay you for one piece of content. And then suddenly stories came out and it was like, can I pay you for one post and two stories or three stories? And then it was like, can I have the rights to edit your content and cut your content up? one creator who created one piece of content might now, four years ago, might now be in 10 pieces of content for you. Now look at the rights and the importance of getting it correct with the licensing frameworks to make sure that you’ve got the right kind of IP rights across all of those and also you’re using them in the right way so that you can get the performance you need.
So I think it’s just a, I think it’s an evolution that’s happening in the market. Content’s becoming more important, IP’s becoming more important. And I think brands are now really engaging with talent throughout all of their marketing budget and spend. And I think you’re going to see a little bit of a shift in terms of how they use this content.
Yeah. So we’re, I guess we’re at a sort of a pivotal moment to an extent, whereas, and maybe to, well, certainly to an extent now that marketers still are underestimating the legal and reputational issues of using content that they don’t fully own. I think so.
Yeah. I think it’s been a, like I said, when we spoke about the missues, I think it’s unknowingly. I think the market’s been a certain way for a period of time and now we’re getting to a point where there’s more scrutiny, especially because of AI. AI has made it really obvious that your image can be used in content without your authorization. And so suddenly there’s this question around my rights in general, your IP rights, your rights, AI rights, content rights, all of this is all kind of encompassing. And so I think it’s becoming, it is a pivotal point. I think AI has done a lot with that, but I also think the growth of the influencer space has contributed towards that massively and how brands engage with them.
Yeah. I mean, I certainly believe that, you know, certainly within the bigger brands that they are encouraging their teams and their agencies to be much more rights conscious from day one. So there’s certainly a cultural shift there, which is great.
As part of that, do you see rights management as a compliance function or a brand enabler? That’s a great question. Somewhere in the middle. I think it’s going to be an auditor, if anything else. I think brands are going to have, we’ve built TrueVise to be multifaceted and to have multi-stakeholders because it’s not one way or the other. I think you’ve got to find alignment.
If you look at the royalty music market and PRS and how they are an auditor to basically help with, you know, fulfillment of contracts and distribution of funds and everything else, I think we’re going to see a shift into the content world of something similar where you’re going to have to have someone in the middle who mediates. And that might even be financial payments.
So there’s a bit of an issue in the influence of world, whether you know or not, about talent being paid out on time. Again, there’s never been a tool that sits in the middle that allows for auditing of content use, for image use, for financial payments and everything else. So I think it’s just, we’re young in the space. It’s been 10 years or so. So how do we now to evolve it to the places it needs to be?
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s also partly because agencies want to put a sequential payment in place under IAB. So, you know, the influencer might want to get paid on 30 days, whatever. The agency might want to pay on 60 days for cash flow, makes sense. But if they’ve not been paid, the talent is not getting paid till… It’s a massive knock-on effect, yeah. There’s misalignment throughout the whole process.
The interesting thing around licensing is when you license content, the content’s created in theory. And so the risk for the campaign not going ahead or the brand wanting to push back on content or have revisions or anything is mitigated. You know, when you license something off Getty or Shutterstock, it’s very easy because the content’s there, it’s created.
So I think you’ll see, again, this shift in terms of where does licensing actually come into the fold? How does that actually help brands as well in terms of paying out creators? Because they want to get closer to creators, they want to work with them better. Having to disappoint them to an extent with payment terms, I know it’s not always them, it can be agencies and everything else. It creates friction in the industry. And it becomes a problem.
Do you think that’s at the point of creation or the point of use? That’s a good question. I think it’s at the point of… The friction’s at the point of creation, I think.
Yeah, I think because there’s so many dependencies still. If you go through trying to work with a talent, firstly, there’s this massive upfront piece of finding the right talent, looking at insights, analysis. It’s got to look and feel like the brand. There’s a lot of… We used to have an influencer, there was a big kind of process around what it looked like, science, synergy, and style. And so there’s a lot of upfront work that goes into that and a lot of dependencies that the brand has to resolve too and also align with.
And so that’s where the bigger risk is. Once content’s created and that’s all been agreed, to licenseit’s actually quite easy. You just need a process of doing so and a framework to make sure you’re doing it above board and it’s being tracked and monitored and everything else in between. Yeah, I mean, that I think leaves me quite nicely into the next question, which is, you know, let’s talk about TrueRights, your stamp and wallet, and how those innovations help marketers and agencies move faster without having the usual legal friction.
Yeah, I think it’s worth at this point kind of telling you how we got there as well, because like I said, I worked in, I think we spoke about it earlier, I worked in partnerships. And so my job, it was amazing. I used to basically go around advising social platforms on how to build out their creative communities. And there was a few key similarities I saw across all the social platforms. And that was that they were, we were building packages for creators to increase media buy from advertisers. So how could X brand work with talent on this platform to increase media spend?
And there was a few things here:
They were always buying the rights for content.
They were always buying three months usage on that platform.
And so I understood it was more about actually having the rights for the content. If I create content and a famous celebrity creates content, which one’s more valuable? That also then realized to me that there’s a big thing around IP in this content. And so those two things were kind of what led us to getting towards TrueRights in general, in terms of the rights area.
The second part of it is I was talking to TikTok and TikTok were telling me about their AI solution, TikTok’s Infinite. Super scary, but super amazing as well. You can take a URL off a website, you can put it into their platform and it will take information, insight around products, messaging on marketing, and put it into a creative brief. It will take that creative brief, it will put it into a video and it will put an avatar in that video. So it’s an end-to-end agency service all from AI.
And I was there thinking, they’re in trouble here because I’m selling lots of work into TikTok and other partners. And so what they then asked me was, well, how do we put IP into this content? And it gave me some really good indications:
They still value talent and creators and everything else in the content because it’s high performing and it’s everything we know about communities and relevance and resonance and everything else.
They wanted to do it ethically, which was a really good indicator from TikTok. It was like, we want to make sure there’s a framework here that allows talent to be safely put into content.
And so with all of this, you kind of step back and you go, well, how do we build for this? We can’t just go jumping in at the gun with AI content and put talent straight in and go, are you happy for us to use your image? It was an operator system. We have to build trust. And where is there mistrust at the moment? Well, there’s mistrust about how content’s being used. And so you kind of have to start with non-AI content and move into AI content.
But the wallet feature and the, what was the other feature you were talking about there? Oh, the stamp. Actually, we’ve got a stamp, yeah. The wallet feature is really interesting. The wallet feature is based off the AI stuff that we’re talking about is the one thing I noticed when talking to all of these AI tools was that they can all go and create content, right? You’ve seen OpenAI, you’ve seen HeyGen, 11 Labs, like amazing tools, fantastic. The one thing they don’t have is access to IP.
And so I never wanted to get into the content creation game. It was more to the point we spoke about brands earlier. We’re a facilitator. How do we go and build relationships with these tools that allow us to integrate IP seamlessly into them that is compatible with their needs so that they can go and work with any talent they want to for their advertisers? Because I think there’ll be this shift of where advertisers used to go to TikTok and Facebook and Meta, I should say, to go and create content. They’re now gonna go to these AI tools because they’re the ones that can create the content.
And so the wallet is a consolidation of your training data. How do we store your IP, your intellectual property, which isn’t just your image anymore, but it’s your mannerisms, your personality, your traits, your height, your weight, your ethnicity, your build. Like how do we build, this is to actually quote someone, Terry Crews was talking about it being intellectual personality, not property anymore, which is really interesting that it’s kind of evolving.
And so the wallet does that. It builds out all of this and it structured it and labels all this data so that we can share it to generative AI tools in a way that’s compatible with how their products work. And also the second part of this is it has to be succinct, right? I can’t have an image of myself now and an image of me 10 years ago because it might mess up the tools because I have aged, unfortunately. And so how do we make sure that we’re structuring content in a way that is consistent?
And so that was the true rights wallet. How do we help talent safely license their IP into AI content for the purpose of branded partnerships? The stamp is what underpinned everything. We needed to make sure that we were building trust in this space because we’re dealing with something very sensitive, your image, your likeness. I don’t expect for anyone to sign that over to anyone really. And so we wanted to give the toolsand the infrastructure that allowed you to feel reassured that when we were licensing, be it content that’s non-AI or training data or AI content to any third party, it was stamped with our mechanism. And so this is an industry standard body that we work with, C2PA, the Content Credentials, Content Provenance, and that proves originality and ownership of content.
What we then do is we then embed metadata and certain licensing information into the manifest. So we’ve got licensing terms, licensing dates, we put rights holders, market use, we also embed your AI rights. And so if you want content to go through our platform and out of our platform, and you don’t want it to train other tools, we can embed it into there. And so then we can talk to other partners about what the purpose of this content is. And it’s meant to try and provide some reassurance around how that content gets used and governed. It then allows us to also monitor the use of that content.
We’ve done some tests with TikTok recently where we’ve been embedding certain features into our stamp, and they’re picking up on their side and it’s coming back, which means that for the first time ever, we can communicate to these platforms at a time which is really pivotal about how your IP is being misused.
We’re actually about to launch something called Talent Rights next week, which I’d love to talk to you about as well.
Wow, okay. This is fantastic. I’m really enjoying the conversation at the moment. And you’re also talking about the stamp to protect your work if you’re a creator as well. I actually noticed my cousin, frankly, the other week, he’s probably in the top 1% of fantasy artists globally. So he does the Magic the Gathering cards. He creates those. World of Warcraft, all the Dungeons and Dragons stuff, does the book covers. Amazing. He’s an incredible talent.
And that’s one of his key paranoias at this point in time, that people like him could become defunct because of the proliferation of AI taking their ideas and their intellectual property and enabling other people to be able to create replicas or similar artifacts. It’s disappointing, right? I think I’m not a talent and nor am I a creator. But if I put as much work into something like these talent do for it to just be taken without permission. To an extent, it’s theft.
I know that these tools are amazing. They’re great facilitators of the next evolution of content and everything else that comes with it. So I can’t discredit them. I just wish they’d done it ethically. And the one thing we’re really gunning for is how can we make sure the talent are fairly compensated or at least get to say whether or not they want to be included within these tools? Because it’s for them to decide. It’s their content. It’s their IP. It shouldn’t be for someone to dictate one way or another. But it should be for how do we give them the frameworks that allow them to safely do it should they wish.
So I’m just going to touch on something which is more around trust and marketing off. So do you see True Rights being integrated into, I guess, the MarTech stash, as it were, over the next few years and being part of a campaign workflow from the idea of ideation through to creation through to getting out into market?
I think definitely we’ll be kind of embedded. We’re talking to agencies, influencer agencies, talent networks, brands, social platforms, we have partnerships with now, generative AI tools. So we’ve got the ecosystem.
And I know when we were talking earlier about the role you play within partnerships and the programs and everything, and I’m fascinated by that. But I think the role we want to play is the above board piece of going we can, brands and anyone can confidently say that they’ve licensed this content in an authorized manner. Because I think that’s the piece we want to get to is making sure that all licensing is authorized.
And so I think we’ll sit somewhere in that kind of middle realm of once content’s created or once there’s ideation, but how do we price this? How do we effectively execute usage rights? How do we make sure we’re getting the most out of them?
Because the second part of it is, and this is, you know, some trade secrets now, so you’ve got to be a bit careful with what I say here. But when a brand works with an agency, they buy the rights for all the content. And so if we’re going to run a campaign right now and you want to run a year-long campaign with X agency, and it’s 300 pieces of content, you’ll buy all 300 pieces of content. Now, in a marketing campaign for a month or two months, you’ll typically use, you know, eight, maybe 20, maybe 30 at a push, but you’ve bought the rights for 300 pieces of content.
And so you can see the amount of waste that’s also going in there because there’s no way to exact usage rights or licensing rights in a more effective way for brands. And so I can see us getting in a little bit later down the line as well in terms of helping, well, agreeing upfront andthen actually executing later on which usage rights we want to start using, which ones are driving performance, how can we check organic performance before actually amplifying the paid push? So there’s going to be, it’s just a different approach now. I think it’s going to be a lot more white glove service around new strikes.
Yeah, I think to a certain extent, you’re talking about the idea of a rights chain and how that’s just as critical as a supply chain. Yeah, spot on. So that’s exactly your thinking in terms of the concept there.
In terms of, hey, look, lessons from the front line, as it were, have you worked with marketing teams or agencies that have had a coast pool? Hey, you don’t have to call them out or name them and or serious issues because of rights management or something that they’ve done or shouldn’t have done.
Yeah, I mean, loads. I think from mismanaging performance to actually misusing content, we’ve run a load of studies, as we said, at True Lights, where some of our beta partners, it says six out of 10. Some of the case studies we did were up at like 80% of the content they provided us had misuse across it, which is crazy to think these talent are being, their IP is being misused, they’re not being compensated for it.
We’re talking here about just like transactional brand talent relationships, but we talk about the bigger piece around tools as well. And so there’s a lot of examples where it’s happening. I think there’s one which is in the press at the moment or was in the press, which is less of a misuse of rights, but it’s still a digital rights management piece. And that’s the Gymshark kind of legal battle at the moment around one of their talent who they stopped working with and then went and worked with an exclusive partner, so a competitor basically.
And now within his contract, obviously, I don’t know the ins and outs of everything, but if I’m looking at that from the top line now, there was no digital rights platform for either one of them to know even what exclusivity or competitive clauses they had to make sure that they weren’t going into a contract they shouldn’t be. And so it’s a very public example of where talent didn’t have the tools to understand what their contracts and their clauses said. And to an extent, I assume the brands obviously knew about it, but there was no building of a relationship there or rapport to let each other know.
And so I think we’ll see more, I think we’ll see more scrutiny from brands also about misuse of rights or misuse of competitors or exclusivity or anything else in those lines, because they’re the ones that are investing in it. They want to make sure that they’re getting their worth, right?
And in terms of, it might be a tidbit or a word of wisdom, I guess, to a certain extent, if there was one thing that you wished every marketer knew about IP and content usage, what would that be? Well, I know that’s a tie, but I’ve got to ask it.
I think it’s, I honestly think it’s usage clauses in contracts. One of our partners gave us 30 odd contracts that they have for their talent. And we looked at contracts from brands, from agencies, from influencer agencies, from networks, from media. They were all inconsistent, like every single clause. Some clauses even had multiple term and duration dates. And so it’d say, we can use this for three months organically. And then two paragraphs down, it’d say, we can use this for two years should we wish. Well, the brand’s obviously going to default to the one that benefits them the most, understandably so.
But I think getting a real steer on your usage clause, because there’s no standardization around it. Some do global digital use. How broad is that? And then others will do specific TikTok UK three months usage. And you can see the difference there in terms of how content can be misused because there’s lack of transparency.
So one thing we’re trying to do is we’re trying to help any talent have a clause that is standardized. It looks at markets, term, duration, channels, formats, exclusivity, everything that’s also compatible with brands so that we can just build some standardization so that both parties know how they should be using it moving forward.
So, hey, I’m just coming to a little bit of a wrap up now, but if you were to provide a piece of advice to a younger individual looking to get into the marketing and the advertising industry, what would that look like?
Well, I think it’d be two things. I think you can’t ignore AI. I think learning anything around AI is just going to help you further develop your skills and competencies. I think be it operational, be it how do you use some of these tools, be it how do you use it to amplify content or creative. I think that’s really important.
The one thing I would always urge is just to be creative. I think like marketing is an attention game, right? How do we get attention for this period of time? And typically that’s done off engagement and entertainment and that’s driven by creative to an extent. So if you can find ways of being super creative, leaning into AI, that’dbe the two kind of bits of advice that I’d give anyone looking to get into marketing anyway.
Great. Well, thanks very much, Ben. You’ve been an incredible guest.
Well, thanks very much, Ben. You’ve been an incredible guest. Wish you well and have a fantastic Advertising Week Europe. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
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