• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 4, 2017

Automating rights and royalty management has been a challenge for most, but FADEL -- a decade-old company working with Marvel, Chronicle Books, F5, Pearson Education and Ogilvy -- will now support advertisers with a cloud-based platform that monitors distribution agreements for music, images, videos and apps.

The platform, Rights Cloud, a subscription-based service based on the number of digital assets, tracks and monitors licensing and distribution rights for content on specific devices. The database supports all the rights related to a specific piece of content.

An unnamed media agency and large financial services are running live on the platform. Publisher Pearson Education has been working to roll out the platform globally. David Jolliffe, VP of Pearson Rights & Permissions, use third-party content such as images and animation in textbooks and ebooks.

This is the first time Pearson will have one rights management platform for all third-party content it licenses, with supplier terms embedded in the system. The platform also will completely automate processes, allowing the company to focus on delivering products rather than the assets.

Jolliffe said the platform also will integrate with the Pearson's financial system, so the company can more easily process payments. The platform will roll out in phases, he said. It will take between 18 months and 2 years because there are many locations.

"It's common for an enterprise brand to manage between 50,000 and 2 million digital assets," said Tarek Fadel, founder of FADEL.  

Cost savings for brands come from the ability to determine whether the content is being used properly, reuse and repurpose content either locally or nationally, and reduce the time it takes to go through a manual workflow to ensure compliance.

Fadel said the platform can shut down a campaign that reaches its distribution or royalty limit by tracking use of those assets based on where and how it's used. The engine won't allow the brand to complete a transaction over the distribution rights limit, for instance.

Rights Cloud also connects to platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager, a digital assets management system, extending the system to manage distribution rights. Those partnerships are extending to advertising agencies, Fadel said. Some are looking at offering the tool as a white-label service.