What It Takes to Clear Media for World-Class Advertising
People see the finished commercial. They see the emotion, pacing, visuals, and message.
They don’t see the hours, days, even months of clearance work that goes into it.
For a recent New York Times campaign titled “It’s Your World to Understand,” the Six Degrees team was tasked with helping clear more than 100 photo and video assets for commercial use within a two-month timeline.
Sounds straightforward, right? Find the owner. Get permission. Use the content.
But it’s rarely that simple.
In reality, there’s no “snap of the fingers” that earns the rights to media and intellectual property.
Projects like this require extensive research, persistent outreach, and a deep understanding of rights and clearances. Our team has to track down photographers, videographers, subjects, estates, and any other rights holders across multiple countries using creative methods with limited information.
It’s an undertaking. That’s where the work begins.
Why Do Rights and Clearances Matter in Advertising?
Before we dive into the project, it’s important to understand our work. Rights and clearances is the process of researching, securing, and verifying permissions for a wide array of creative assets and third-party intellectual property.
This includes:
- Video footage
- Photography
- Music
- Logos and trademarks
- Likeness and talent
- Archival material
- User-generated content (UGC)
- Taglines or slogans
Just because content exists online doesn’t mean it’s free to use. As these waters are continuously muddied by social media, UGC, and AI, we’re seeing uncleared content hit the mainstream regularly.
Where it gets particularly sticky is when that content is used for commercial purposes.
Some “Fair Use” cases allow the use of media in editorial and personal projects, but pretty much anything used for commercial and advertising purposes needs the appropriate licensing. You aren’t allowed to make money off others’ assets without permission.
Big brands and companies operate under significant legal scrutiny, so the more visibility on a project, the greater the risk.
This is where the importance of clearances comes in. Someone owns the content. And the challenge is figuring out who and securing the rights.
Accessing media rights can be pretty taxing, requiring the correct contacts and understanding of copyright law. This is one of Six Degrees’ biggest offerings. We’ll evaluate your media, identify the rights holders, reach out, negotiate commercial licensing fees, and secure the rights to the right content.
Turning a Creative Vision Into a Clearance Strategy
For this New York Times campaign, Six Degrees became an extension of their creative team.
Having put together a rough cut for the finished ad, the NYT and their collaborators at Isle of Any gave our team a clear vision of the specific content that needed to be cleared.
We were handed a wishlist of more than 100 desired media assets to transform into a realistic, actionable clearance strategy.
All of the provided clips and photos were used previously by the NYT for editorial purposes. But those rights are very different than commercial usage rights.
Editorial use is strictly for educational, informative, or storytelling purposes, and is much more lax on legal permissions. Commercial use involves promoting, selling, or endorsing something to generate a profit, requiring mandatory releases on pretty much everything.
Essentially, we had to start from square one.
Splitting the workload between several of our Senior Research & Clearance Specialists, we dove headfirst into a world we understand best.
Behind the Scenes: What Creative Research Actually Looks Like
The process of clearing media and getting the commercial usage rights is a spectrum.
For some projects, we may be given a contact name, reach out, and they agree to license media for free. Perfect. That’s an ideal situation.
But we all know that’s rarely the case.
Since the Times had used this content before, some of the assets came with clear ownership. But most had minimal to nothing. This left our team using some creative problem-solving to track them down.
Evaluation
To get the process started, we need to evaluate the content, considering a series of questions to help us narrow in on the usage and rights owners.
- Who created it?
- Who owns it today?
- Is there recognizable talent involved?
- Are additional approvals needed?
- Can it be licensed for commercial use?
- Can it be licensed within the budget?
- Are there existing copyright concerns?
A one-second clip of 20 young ballet dancers might look simple to clear. It isn’t.
Each of those spinning kids needs to be identified, their parents or guardians tracked down, and then get approval from each one of them. Not to mention the videographer, choreographer, venue, etc. One “no” immediately removes that clip from consideration.
Research
After the initial evaluation, the real treasure hunt begins.
In many ways, what we do at Six Degrees resembles investigative work. Several on the team are part researcher, part creative strategist, and part detective.
Metadata isn’t tracked like it used to be. Sometimes ownership records are incomplete. Sometimes the creators have changed organizations. Sometimes you only have a username like “photographer123” from someone’s defunct Flickr account.
To find the right contacts, our team uses several tools, internal resources, and methods, including:
- Reverse images searches
- Internal databases
- Public records
- Social media platforms
- Industry networks and contacts
- Direct outreach
- And so much more
For some assets, it may only take a few minutes to find the right contact. For others, it can take hours, even days if we’re waiting to hear back from someone.
During this project, one of our specialists had to reach out to a filmmaker, and they just weren’t responding. After a little deep research, they discovered the filmmaker was in a residency program. They got the contact information for the program and reached out, only to discover the filmmaker was no longer in the program. But that creative outreach led to the filmmaker learning about our team’s work, and we were finally able to connect and clear the media.
While Six Degrees goes above and beyond to engage with the right people for every project, we do have to set limits for how much digging an asset requires. If it’s not happening in the timeline we need, we’ll pivot and research creative alternatives that still fit the brief.
How Personalization and Persistence Give Six Degrees the Upper Hand
At first glance, some companies assume media clearance services can be handled internally. And sometimes they can.
But as projects scale, the complexity grows quickly.
The New York Times has world-class journalists, researchers, producers, and legal teams. But what they, and many of the clients that work with us at Six Degrees, lack is the time, capacity, and persistence.
The keyword here is persistence.
Many rights holders don’t respond to the first email. Or the second.
Others may not see the original message because it lands in spam folders, old email inboxes, or to the wrong person entirely.
Where our team makes progress is through our investigative research and persistent contact. Successful clearances often require multiple touchpoints, alternative communication methods, and creative problem-solving when all else fails.
If the original source can’t be reached, who might know them?
If a photographer isn’t responding, is there an editor, representative, or agency that can help us get in contact?
If they don’t respond to an email, can we find a phone number or social media profile?
This level of persistence saves clients a significant amount of time, effort, and often, money.
Beyond persistence, we personalize.
Spam is rampant these days. So much so that it’s hard to decipher what’s real and what’s a chatbot hosted in another country. That brings another layer of complication to our roles.
Every time we reach out to a new contact, we approach the conversation with authenticity and trustworthiness. We want our contacts to feel respected, understand our ask, and feel comfortable sharing something they own with the world.
In all our years of experience, we’ve found humans respond best to humans.
The Value of Experience
Founded in 2009, Six Degrees Rights & Clearances brings more than 15 years of networking, relationships, and industry expertise.
Every clearance project presents a different challenge. And that experience creates a knowledge base that can’t be replicated by software or AI alone.
It’s why clients turn to specialists like Six Degrees.
The work isn’t impossible without us. But our expertise dramatically reduces uncertainty, saves time, and increases the likelihood of successfully clearing projects.
Bringing a Special Project to Life
Reflecting on this NYT campaign, our specialists knew early on it was going to be one for the books.
After seeing early drafts of the story, we knew that our clearance work would be essential to bringing this story to the masses.
Clearances impact creative quality. Sure, our team is happy to step in and offer creative alternatives where necessary. We actually specialize in creative research. But when a client has a vision, we do our best to deliver.
Using the right licensed media for a project can elevate its emotional resonance. For a campaign centered on one of the nation’s oldest newspapers, getting that tone right through the screen is essential.
There’s also so much nuance to news media, where we may need to reach journalists in a war-torn Syria or overcome European bureaucracy for a clip of a rocket launch.
Without our teams’ confidence and composure, this impactful storytelling wouldn’t make the final cut.
Behind every approved image, licensed clip, and cleared asset is a process.
Our team rarely gets to watch the final product of our labor. The “It’s Your World to Understand” campaign was moving in a way we don’t get to see very often. The rhythm of the narrative and imagery was constructed so intentionally to the beat. With the impact of the approved visuals, it was no surprise that this ad won Craft of the Year at Ad Age’s 2026 Creativity Awards.
Projects like this one are reminders that compelling creative doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when teams come together with a process built on research, persistence, communication, and expertise.
At Six Degrees, that’s the work we love.
Building a Campaign That Relies on the Right Licensed Media?
From research and vetting to full rights clearance, Six Degrees is the one-stop shop to get you the right content and the right to use it with clarity and confidence.
If you or your team are looking for clearance solutions, we’d love to learn how Six Degrees can help you.
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