The content is yours, forever

An athlete told me once about the best footage anyone had ever shot of him. A full crew, proper cameras, a brand paying for all of it, three days on a wall that he'd wanted to climb for years. Beautiful stuff. Genuinely beautiful. He showed me a thirty second cut on his phone.

Then I asked him where the rest of it was. And he went quiet, and said he didn't actually have it. The brand had it. He'd signed it away without really reading the bit that said so, the way we all sign things away, and now the best three days of climbing anyone had ever captured of him lived on a hard drive in an office he'd never see, to be used when and if that company felt like it. He was the subject of the footage. He didn't own a single frame.

That story stuck in me like a splinter. Because it's so normal. It's so completely standard that most athletes don't even think of it as a loss. You do the shoot, you deliver the shoot, the shoot belongs to whoever paid. That's the arrangement. You rented out not just your face but the record of the thing you did, and you kept a phone-sized clip as a souvenir.

So when we designed how Loaf works, this was one of the lines I wouldn't move on. The content is yours. Outright. Forever. Everything shot on your experience belongs to you, for your channels, your future sponsors, your portfolio, for as long as you're doing this and longer. We don't own it. We don't licence it back to you. We don't put our logo in the corner and call it ours with you in it. It's yours the way your own memory is yours, except in 4K and you can post it.

I want to be blunt about why, because it's not charity. It's the difference between a campaign and a business. A campaign is a thing you deliver and lose. A business is a thing you build and keep. If you walk away from a week with us and the only thing you own is the fee, we've just been a slightly nicer version of the brand deal you already had. But if you walk away owning the experience, the footage, the relationships and the income, you've got assets. Real ones. The kind that compound. The kind you can still be earning from in three years, long after any brand deal would have expired and left you back at the inbox.

This isn't a photoshoot. It isn't our campaign with you delivering the content for us. I know it can look like one from the outside, a group of fit people doing something dramatic in a beautiful place with cameras around. But the ownership runs the other way to every arrangement you've been offered before. It's your trip. We carry everything that isn't the hard part, we fund it, we sort the logistics, we take on the risk of putting it on. And everything that comes out the other side is yours.

A like disappears in a feed by Thursday. A library of your best work, that you actually own, doesn't go anywhere. One is rented. The other is yours. I know which one I'd want to be building.