The Rights Check: Teardown of Five UGC Ad Candidates
Objective: Given five customer-submitted UGC assets shortlisted for a paid ad rotation, apply the lesson's rights-status ladder and authenticity-preservation rule to catch what cannot legally or credibly run before media spend locks in.
You're the junior marketing associate on GrabFood's paid social team. Your manager has shortlisted five customer-submitted photos and captions tagged #GrabFoodMoments for next month's Instagram ad rotation, and wants your rights-and-quality sign-off before the media buy locks the schedule.
Review each candidate against the rights-status ladder (pending / cleared-organic / cleared-paid) and the authenticity-preservation rule, then flag anything that cannot run as paid creative.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, no account friction, and matches the three-state rights tag the lesson recommends
Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)
Removes manual comment-reply tracking once the UGC volume outgrows a spreadsheet
No access? Google Sheets with a manual comment-reply workflow
The process
Specimens to review
Can this asset run in the paid Instagram rotation next week? What has to happen first, if anything?
Candidate #1: A customer's Instagram Story showing a GrabFood delivery bag on their doorstep, caption 'best chicken rice ever'. Tagged @GrabSG. Status field in the tracker: blank. No record of any outreach to the customer.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
This candidate is fully rights-cleared, the customer signed a release. Is it still a strong UGC ad candidate as-is?
Candidate #2: A 12-second customer video, color-corrected to match GrabFood's green brand palette, with the Grab logo watermark burned into the bottom-right corner and the original handheld shake stabilized in post.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
The tracker calls this 'organic UGC.' Does that classification hold up?
Candidate #3: A polished, lo-fi-styled unboxing video submitted through the brand's paid creator agency, but logged in the tracker under 'organic UGC' with no disclosure tag and no compensation note.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Is this candidate ready to run as paid creative?
Candidate #4: A customer's tagged photo, followed by a brand comment reading 'Reply #yesGrab to give us permission to feature this in our ads,' the customer replied #yesGrab, and the reply is screenshotted and stored in the tracker with today's date.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Final deliverable
A five-row sign-off log stating, for each candidate, its rights status, whether it can run paid, and the single fix required if it can't.
See a reference example
Care.com UGC sign-off log (excerpt) Candidate: Nanny testimonial video, tagged @caredotcom Rights status: cleared-organic only Paid-ready: NO Fix required: send creator-portal consent form, no signed release on file for commercial use Candidate: In-app review screenshot, no creator attached Rights status: n/a, not a personal creative work Paid-ready: YES, reviews are not subject to creator rights clearance Fix required: none
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Correctly flags all uncleared or mislabeled candidates as not paid-ready
- Identifies the over-produced candidate as an authenticity risk, not a rights risk
- Distinguishes a cosmetic DAM gap from a legal blocker