“Seekr Align unlocks extra brand-safe promoting alternatives in a podcast panorama that’s notoriously complicated and troublesome to navigate,” mentioned Rob Clark, President and Chief Know-how Officer of Seekr. “In a brief interval, Align has already evaluated over 8 million minutes of podcasts and utilized Seekr’s proprietary scoring, enabling the specified alignment between a model and content material. The quantity of content material scored by the platform will enhance five-fold by the top of the yr, far outpacing aggressive choices.”
Throughout the product beta launch, Align generated pre-order commitments from prime manufacturers whose collective 2024 spends are anticipated to exceed $100 million. Main manufacturers which have signed on to make use of Align embody Babbel, Bayer, Fixed Contact, MasterClass, Quip, SimpliSafe, and Tommy John, amongst others.
“Model security and suitability ought to do greater than blocking phrases or avoiding complicated conversations. First-gen audio instruments have been overcomplicated and unreliable: they’re too liable to false negatives and false positives, routinely permitting key phrases to set off threat content material rankings. This has created confusion amongst entrepreneurs, whereas scaring them away from accountable podcasts and customarily inflicting them to underutilize podcasts for promoting,” mentioned Dan Granger, CEO of Oxford Highway, the nation’s largest unbiased audio promoting company, which helped within the improvement of the platform. “Align simplifies the method of discovering secure and appropriate podcast by marrying world-class engineering with modern and clear rankings, permitting manufacturers to navigate with nuance to allow them to confidently develop their audio marketing campaign with elevated readability and pace.”
Align is being launched on the outset of what guarantees to be a extremely polarized political season, and at a time when many manufacturers say they’re dealing with rising repetitional dangers as their advertisements inadvertently seem subsequent to problematic content material. On the similar time, manufacturers proceed to face challenges in reaching bigger, extremely engaged audiences safely as a result of they’ve little to no visibility into the model suitability of the “lengthy tail” of podcasts – hundreds of exhibits that fall exterior of the High 100.
Seekr Align identifies never-before-measured, industry-specific indicators that strike on the coronary heart of security and suitability by capturing the nuanced essence of a dialog, going above and past the World Alliance for Accountable Media (GARM) model security and suitability flooring, in the end enabling manufacturers to soundly attain a a lot larger viewers.
The primary of those indicators, Seekr’s Civility Rating, (patent and trademark pending), tracks private assaults, together with people who may not essentially register as hate speech below GARM, however are nonetheless hostile in nature. The Align platform, which is in-built Seekr’s giant language mannequin utilized for the Civility Rating, permits the top consumer to overlay desired threat filters, together with GARM, giving manufacturers extra management and ease.
Due to the constraints of present expertise, Seekr provides human-in-the-loop capabilities to make sure that manufacturers can really feel assured they’re aligning with applications that debate a broad spectrum of numerous subjects with out selling divisive and incendiary content material.
Seekr Align is redefining how podcast content material is evaluated to align with model targets due to its potential to really perceive the nuances of language in audio. Anticipated advances in model security and suitability are one of many primary explanation why the interactive Promoting Bureau (IAB) initiatives podcast promoting income will do greater than double to $4 bullion in 2025.
“There’s a totally different method that Oprah and Alex Jones would possibly deal with the identical topic in a chunk of content material,” added Granger. “Align dietary supplements GARM with extra nuanced capabilities such because the Civility Sore, which places the emphasis on the spirit of the dialog, as a substitute of punishing creators who take a accountable strategy to discussing essential points which might be probably controversial.”
