Seekr Align unlocks more brand-safe advertising opportunities in a podcast landscape that is notoriously complex and difficult to navigate.
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.
Rob Clark, President and Chief Technology Officer of Seekr, said, “Seekr Align unlocks more brand-safe advertising opportunities in a podcast landscape that is notoriously complex and difficult to navigate. 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.”
Dan Granger, CEO of Oxford Road, the nation’s largest independent audio advertising agency, which helped in the development of the platform, said, “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. Align simplifies the process of finding safe and suitable podcasts 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 reputational 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.
