IPG Mediabrands Steps Up Misinformation Guardrails

IPG Mediabrands this morning unveiled plans to step up its efforts to safeguard clients from the negative impact of misinformation in media — especially on social media — prioritizing political, climate, healthcare, AI-generated and brand-specific content.

The initiative, which is being announced along with a new spate of research revealing how consumers feel about brand advertising in misinformation environments (see related story), includes an expansion of an ongoing research relationship between IPG Mediabrand’s Magna and brand content safety platform Zefr, as well as new technology developed by IPG Mediabrands’ Kinesso unit.

Specifically, Kinesso has developed custom video algorithms capable of identifying the ​“suitability” of brand advertising placed in various media that also optimize video campaign-specific outcomes and KPIs.

IPG Mediabrands did not disclose exactly how those algorithms work, but said it is introducing them now, because ​“the ad environment is primed for misinformation with major cyclical events and growing ad spend,” an acknowledgement to what is projected to be a record political ad spending and social media and news coverage cycle leading up to the U.S. presidential election in November.

IPG Mediabrands said the expansion of its relationship with Zefr includes two new features: ​“pre-campaign media responsibility profiles” leveraging AI technology to ​“proactively block unsuitable categories” flagged for misinformation and high brand safety risk across social media platforms; ​“custom misinformation avoidance” for user-generated content (UGC), including dashboards enabling agency and client teams to avoid sensitive categories such as the U.S. elections and climate denialism.

IPG Mediabrands described the UGC tool as having ​“multi-modal video, image, text, and audio detection for full misinformation content avoidance powered by integrations with global fact-checks, beyond publisher or webpage-based analysis.”