Preflight an AI UGC ad for TikTok: is the disclosure on screen?

Pull a few stills from the final file and look at them before the upload. Darkroom reports that undisclosed commercial content can be removed from the For You feed or have its reach limited (read 2026-10-02; an agency summary, not TikTok's page). A disclosure line that was meant to burn in but did not, because a render step failed or a crop cut it off, is the kind of miss a two-minute check catches.

What should the preflight check?

Four things, all visible in stills and probe data: the disclosure line is on screen, it is readable at phone size, it is not cut by the frame edge, and the clip's length and audio are what you expect.

How do you pull the stills?

Send the clip's media.sume.com URL with a few times: one near the start, one in the middle and one near the end. Time values must be inside the clip's duration, or the worker returns frame_time_out_of_range. Open the returned stills and read the line.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-frames \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: preflight-ad-001" \
  -d '{"video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/ad.mp4",
       "at": [0.5, 6, 11], "format": "png"}'

Can the check be automated?

Partly. The probe and stills are machine-readable, so a script can confirm duration, audio and that the frames exist. Reading the text in the frame is a human step in this post, because the stills are images and Sume's frames job does not return the text it contains.

Add a transcript check when the line is spoken: video inspect can transcribe the clip at $0.01 per audio minute (confirm in GET /v1/catalog). Then compare the words with your script and your disclosure wording.

What should block the upload?

Treat any failed check as a stop. If the line is missing in the first still, re-run the caption or compose step and check again; do not upload and hope. A rule written as a short checklist, with one named owner, works better than a general intention to look at every clip.

The preflight is cheap because probe and stills are unbilled. Only the optional transcript and any re-render cost money, so there is little reason to skip it on a paid campaign.