We were told that “new media” is a retired term and that correcting our own page would be the best demonstration of our method yet. It is not retired. The union’s New Media Agreement is live, and the correction confuses a commercial’s payment category with a heading on your CV.

The correction we are not making

Our research proposed that we correct our own page, and said doing so would demonstrate this site’s method better than any error we have caught in anybody else. We checked it, and the correction is wrong.

The argument was that the 2022 SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract eliminated the “Internet” and “New Media” categories, so a résumé heading using that phrase is out of date. The first half of that is true. The second half does not follow from it.

Principal or extra, and the test that only covers commercials

This page has been saying that “hero” is not a standard commercial tier without saying what is. There are two, and there is a published test for moving between them — but it does not mean what we were about to say it means.

Contractually it is a binary. Principal and extra, on two separate employment contracts, which the union’s current documents call Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2 rather than the A-numbered versions still circulating.

Two classifications actors reliably get wrong, and this is where the tier question actually bites. Hand models and stand-ins are extras. The union’s own commercial rate materials list hand models, general extras and stand-ins together under a heading of extras, each with its own rate. So “Hand Model, Nike” is contractually background work, and belongs where background work belongs, which is off the credits section.

One thing we are being careful about. The reasoning usually given for hand models — that only body parts are visible — is not union language. It comes from production company blogs. The classification is union-sourced. The explanation is not, and we would rather separate those than pass one off as the other.

Why an extra credit cannot be dressed up

Our page argues that background work does not go on a résumé. The structural reason is stronger than the etiquette reason, and it is slightly narrower than we were going to claim.

The version we were handed is that no on-screen credit is ever given for background or extra work, so the claim has no possible corroboration. That is very nearly right.

A conflict expires. The line does not.

This page’s best argument is that a named brand reads as a live restriction to somebody who cannot tell when it lapsed. It used to be made without a number. The number exists, and it is not the one our research gave us.

We were told to add twenty-one months. The maximum period of use rose to twenty-four in the 2025 contract, effective from April of that year.

So the sharpened point stands and now has arithmetic behind it. The restriction runs two years at the outside. The line on your résumé will sit there for five. A named brand advertises a permanent restriction where there was only ever a temporary one, to somebody who cannot check and will not spend the time trying.

Britain does none of this

Every number above is American, and two previous chapters flagged the British half as unresearched. It is a different system rather than different figures.

There are no holding fees here, so there is no thirteen-week cycle to count and no maximum period to run out. The agreement is between Equity, the advertising agencies, the production companies and the advertisers, and the money works on measured exposure.

The practical consequence for a British actor is the useful bit. Because exclusivity is a clause you negotiated rather than a cycle that runs on its own, you can look it up. It is written in the contract with an end date. The American actor has to track cycles they never see; you have to keep the paperwork.

The order of the headings, and a disagreement

Two Backstage sources give different standing orders and one of them excludes a category the other includes. We are printing the disagreement rather than picking.

Where streaming work goes, since the category question above has cleared it up. A series is television and a feature is film, by format rather than by who paid for it. New media is for work made for release on new media platforms, which is a real and current contractual category rather than a synonym for anything on the internet.

The actor-model question, and what we could not find out

This page’s answer is that the industry solved actor-model by inventing a second document rather than by cramming your inseam onto the acting résumé. That still holds. We went to describe the second document and could not fully do it.

The document is the size card on Actors Access. We can confirm it holds height, weight, shoe size and jacket size, with fields that change according to gender and whether the performer is a child or an adult, and that there are five gender options.

Grading the sources

This is the first page in the section where our research handed us a correction to our own work and the correction was the error.

One item worth carrying elsewhere. The 2025 contract renames a section to remove “visually impaired” in favour of “low vision”, and requires the producer to provide the script in advance of the audition and the work in an accessible format on request. That is a real and dated provision and it belongs on our disability material rather than here.

Where we differ from the standard account

Do one thing tonight. Take every brand name out of your commercial section and replace the lot with one line saying conflicts are available on request. Then write down, somewhere you will find it again, the shoot date of each one — because release is silent, nobody will tell you when it lapses, and that line is a promise you have just made.