Consent management has two very different problems hiding under the same name.
The first is the one you probably searched for: cookie banners, tracking scripts, GDPR compliance for websites. Klaro, Osano, and Silktide all solve this well. Most are free.
The second is one most guides miss entirely: collecting footage from your event crowd and having the legal right to use it. If you run festivals, sports events, or conferences and want to turn attendee video into content you can actually publish, share with sponsors, or use in campaigns, you need consent that covers image rights, IP licensing, and commercial usage. A cookie banner covers none of that. SureShot was built specifically for this second problem.
The rest of this post explains why the two problems are legally distinct, and what proper event footage consent actually requires.
What cookie consent tools actually do
Before going further, it's worth being clear on what cookie consent tools cover.
Tools like Klaro, Cookie Consent by Osano, and Silktide all solve the same core problem: blocking third-party tracking scripts — analytics, advertising pixels, and similar tools — until a visitor explicitly accepts them. They maintain consent records, display banners, and help you meet GDPR’s requirement for affirmative consent to data processing.
They are the right tool for website tracking compliance. They are not consent management for event footage.
The legal distinction matters. Cookie consent is governed by GDPR Article 6 and the ePrivacy Directive. What you need when collecting footage at an event is different: it covers intellectual property law, image and likeness rights, and content licensing agreements. These are separate legal frameworks, and no cookie banner covers them.
The four consent problems in event footage
When an attendee uploads a clip from your festival, match, or conference, you're dealing with four things at once.
Intellectual property rights
The person who filmed the clip owns it. Copyright sits with the creator by default. To use that footage, you need them to transfer or licence the rights to you, in writing, before they submit it.
Image and likeness rights
Other people appear in that video. They didn't consent to being recorded, and they didn't consent to appearing in your event highlights reel or a sponsor's social campaign. Depending on your jurisdiction, publishing footage without appropriate consent carries real legal risk.
Commercial usage rights
Using attendee footage in paid advertising, sponsor deliverables, or branded content requires a different level of consent than simply posting a recap video. Many organisers discover this when a sponsor asks for footage and the legal team gets involved.
Real-time collection at scale
At a festival or large event, you need hundreds of people to consent during the event, not weeks afterwards. Chasing down contributors by email to get a signature is not a workable process. Consent has to happen at the point of upload.
Why this catches organisers off guard
Most events collect footage informally. Attendees post to social media, the organiser reposts it, sponsors get screenshots. This works fine until someone objects, or until a brand partner asks for proper usage documentation before signing off on content.
The risk is low at small community events. It grows quickly once you have sponsors, commercial partners, or media ambitions. If you’re running a music festival, a sports event, or a corporate conference with brand partnerships, you need documented consent that covers commercial use.
Not a terms-of-service acknowledgement buried in your website footer. A proper licence, collected at the moment of submission.
How SureShot handles consent for event footage
The consent step is built into the upload flow. When an attendee submits footage through SureShot, they accept a content licence before the clip enters your library. The agreement covers IP transfer, commercial usage rights, and confirmation that the person uploading is the one who filmed it.
Every clip arrives with documented permissions attached. You can see who submitted each piece of footage, filter by consent status, and export records if a partner or legal team asks for them.
Your team then reviews the footage and selects the best clips for the film. Submissions land in an organised dashboard sorted by time, location, or tag, so the review process stays manageable even when you have hundreds of clips coming in.
No chasing contributors after the event. No legal grey areas when a sponsor asks for usage documentation. Consent is collected and recorded before the footage reaches your library.
Questions worth asking when evaluating tools
If you’re looking at options for event footage collection, these are the things to check:
Does consent happen at the point of upload, or as a separate step that most people skip? Does the agreement cover commercial usage, or just basic data processing? Are consent records stored against individual submissions? Can you export documentation for external partners?
A cookie consent tool will fail every one of those questions. That’s not a criticism — they were built for a different problem.
For a full breakdown of what to look for in a platform built for events, see the UGC platform evaluation guide for event organisers.
The short version
If you run a website, you need a cookie consent tool. Klaro, Osano, and Silktide are all solid options depending on your setup and technical resource.
If you run events and want to legally collect, licence, and use footage from your crowd, you need something built for that specific workflow. The legal requirements are different, the consent moment is different, and the documentation you need at the end is different.
Book a demo and we’ll walk you through how the consent flow works end to end.
