Seekr, an artificial intelligence company specializing in transparent content evaluation and generation, announced the release of Seekr Align, an advanced brand safety and suitability tool that unlocks new audience reach by giving brands and ad agencies unprecedented visibility into hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes whose brand safety and suitability is largely unknown. Align, which is built on Seekr’s large language model, combines Seekr’s proprietary content evaluation and scoring capabilities with and industry-leading user-friendly interface.

“Seekr Align unlocks more brand-safe advertising opportunities in a podcast landscape that is notoriously complex and difficult to navigate,” said Rob Clark, President and Chief Technology Officer of Seekr. “In a short period, Align has already evaluated over 8 million minutes of podcasts and applied Seekr’s proprietary scoring, enabling the desired alignment between a brand and content. The volume of content scored by the platform will increase five-fold by the end of the year, far outpacing competitive offerings.”

During the product beta launch, Align generated pre-order commitments from top brands whose collective 2024 spends are expected to exceed $100 million. Leading brands that have signed on to use Align include Babbel, Bayer, Constant Contact, MasterClass, Quip, SimpliSafe, and Tommy John, among others.

“Brand safety and suitability should do more than blocking words or avoiding complex conversations. First-gen audio tools have been overcomplicated and unreliable: they are too prone to false negatives and false positives, routinely allowing key words to trigger risk content ratings. This has created confusion among marketers, while scaring them away from responsible podcasts and generally causing them to underutilize podcasts for advertising,” said Dan Granger, CEO of Oxford Road, the nation’s largest independent audio advertising agency, which helped in the development of the platform. “Align simplifies the process of finding safe and suitable podcast by marrying world-class engineering with innovative and transparent ratings, allowing brands to navigate with nuance so they can confidently grow their audio campaign with increased clarity and speed.”

Align is being introduced at the outset of what promises to be a highly polarized political season, and at a time when many brands say they’re facing growing repetitional risks as their ads inadvertently appear next to problematic content. At the same time, brands continue to face challenges in reaching larger, highly engaged audiences safely because they have little to no visibility into the brand suitability of the “long tail” of podcasts – thousands of shows that fall outside of the Top 100.

Seekr Align identifies never-before-measured, industry-specific signals that strike at the heart of safety and suitability by capturing the nuanced essence of a conversation, going above and beyond the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) brand safety and suitability floor, ultimately enabling brands to safely reach a much bigger audience.

The first of these signals, Seekr’s Civility Score, (patent and trademark pending), tracks personal attacks, including those that might not necessarily register as hate speech under GARM, but are still hostile in nature. The Align platform, which is built in Seekr’s large language model applied for the Civility Score, allows the end user to overlay desired risk filters, including GARM, giving brands more control and simplicity.

Because of the limitations of current technology, Seekr offers human-in-the-loop capabilities to ensure that brands can feel confident they’re aligning with programs that discuss a broad spectrum of diverse topics without promoting divisive and incendiary content.

Seekr Align is redefining how podcast content is evaluated to align with brand objectives because of its ability to truly understand the nuances of language in audio. Anticipated advances in brand safety and suitability are one of the main reasons why the interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) projects podcast advertising revenue will do more than double to $4 bullion in 2025.

“There is a different way that Oprah and Alex Jones might treat the same subject in a piece of content,” added Granger. “Align supplements GARM with more nuanced capabilities such as the Civility Sore, which puts the emphasis on the spirit of the conversation, instead of punishing creators who take a responsible approach to discussing important issues that are potentially controversial.”

Seekr, a revolutionary artificial intelligence company specializing in transparent content evaluation, and Oxford Road, the leading independent ad agency in audio, announced the launch of the first-ever Civility Score for podcasts. Seekr’s Civility Score harnesses proprietary AI to offer brand marketers a more precise way to measure brand sustainability in podcast advertising, maximizing brand affinity and return on investment. 

“As the marketplace becomes more open to objective, third-party assessments of media content, the Civility Score provides brands with a simple-to-understand and extraordinarily effective way to protect themselves from high-risk content,” said Pat Condo, CEO and Founder of Seekr Technologies. “It is a tool designed to move beyond the traditional brand safety and suitability frameworks and strike at the heart of the polarization problem.”

Seekr’s Civility Score will use AI to objectively measure ad hominem attacks within the nation’s top podcasts – a key contributor to societal polarization and aggression. Brands can use the detailed scoring to guide their media planning, setting polarization and aggression. Brands can use the detailed scoring to guide their media planning, setting tolerance levels that maintain brand integrity and minimize exposure to potentially damaging content. Specifically, key features of the Civility Score include:

Civility Ranking: Seekr scores podcasts from low to high based on the level of personal attack in each show, factoring in content and nuance when presence of an attack is found.

Risk Trends: Seekr tracks civility trends to allow brands to adjust their media spend accordingly and align with quality content.

Detailed Metrics: Seekr provides metrics on the amount and nature of personal attacks found in evaluated show content per hour, giving brands detailed data to speed up the evaluation process.

The Civility Score scans podcast episodes in their entirety, enabling it to spot instances of ad hominem attacks that occur at any point in a program, so brands can avoid getting caught in the crossfire. This also identifies instances where topics of discussion that may not be inherently controversial and therefore not covered by GARM’s 12-point Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework.

“We’re proud to have partnered with tech firms in the past to bring content evaluation solutions to the audio space,” said Dan Granger, CEO and Founder of Oxford Road. “Still, what the industry needs most is one metric that transcends subjectivity and promotes a value around which we can all align; respect for others. The strength of the Civility Score is its simplicity, as all brands, consumers, and creators can align around this expression of the Golden Rule. Now, we can reward the most responsible voices, rather than those that are simply the loudest.”

The launch of the Civility Score will take place at the Chief Audio Officer Summit, an event that brings together marketers from the leading brands in audio. Initially, the Civility Score will focus on podcasts, with plans to expand its scope to provide broader applications in all forms of media.

For further information or custom solutions, visit https://seekr.com/