Author: Freddy Mini

CEO & Co-founder

They say about nous. [update #2]

Here’s a selection of the feedback we got lately.

Agencies

We met with Franck Farrugia, CEO Omnicom Group France and says about us:

“TrustedOut provides us with what we have been looking for a long time, namely a dynamic construction of secure advertising delivery environments for our advertisers. But this is also far beyond that, since they allow us to select broadcasting environments according to the levels of trust that an audience and a target group grants to content, thus maximizing advertising impact, because more than ever, trust is the major issue in the relationship between brands and consumers. » 

Advertisers

We met Samir, Chief Digital Officer at La Redoute (very large ecommerce site), and he wrote this:

“Yesterday, I met Freddy Mini, a briscard who was CEO of Netvibes;) Now he launches Trustedout and it feels really good to see a StartUp that not only promises a solution that everyone calls for and especially that shows it! It really works!!! Don’t look any further… or at least I found it!”

Searchers and Teachers.

We also met with Fabrice from SciencePo, a famous school and Dominique, who worked for Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne and SciencePo. Following our meeting, Dominique wrote this: TrustedOut, AI to explain who you trust.

The way TrustedOut deals with the issue of trust seemed to me to be one of the most clever and feasible.

TrustedOut really bluffed me.

But by systematically formalising content descriptors, TrustedOut makes it possible to give applicants the ability to explain their trust criteria,

Government.

We met Eric Bothorel, Deputy of the Côtes d’Armor, at the National Assembly, in charge of Hate Speech questions on the Internet:

I was receiving @TrustedOut (@freddymini @florentsolt): a promising solution #DeepLearning to ensure the presence of brands in relevant places and safe trustedout.com
➡️What if the solution to no longer finance hate sites was French?
#HateSpeech

More to come soon… Stay tuned.

And as usual, feel free to contact us if you have questions!

 

 

Fine tuning your corpus to perfect analytics and build brand consistent whitelists.

Let’s have a look at some cool product updates our alpha-testers can enjoy since last night.

Demo scenario: Let say we want to create a Corpus for the US Food Market for some analytics on our brand and a new ad campaign coming right up.

1/ The broad definition. Country and Taxonomy.

Add country, select United States.

Add Taxonomy IS made of these two classifications :

  • Industry > Manufacturing and Retail > Food and Beverages
  • People > Lifestyle > Food and Beverages Services.

As you know, TrustedOut also profiles the level of expertise and the sensitivity on news for each media over the period of rolling time the taxonomy is computed. Here we want ALL levels and a taxonomy, stable, over the past rolling quarter (-90 days from today). We do recompute and update everything permanently.

We have 4,003 media for our Whitelist and 10,027 sources to feed our analytic tools with.

2/ Refining the target. Excluding a classification.

For this effort, we do not want media specialized in Food Processing, profiled over the same period of time, so we exclude it from our Corpus like this:

  • IS Industry > Manufacturing and Retail > Food and Beverages
  • IS People > Lifestyle > Food and Beverages Services.
  • IS NOT Industry > Agriculture > Food Processing

We now have 487 media and 732 sources.

3/ Hand picking media we do or do not want. By name, by URL.

(this is an example. nothing personal for those sites 🙂

From past experiences, we do not want to work with anything related to foodnavigator.com and its subsidiaries, neither do we want a site named “Food processing”. Clicking on “Get” and Scrolling through the media list TrustedOut gives me, I see they, indeed, are in the list:

Let’s remove them.

Let’s tell our corpus to add the following conditions:

  • Name DOES NOT CONTAIN “Food processing”
  • Website DOES NOT CONTAIN “foodnavigator” in its domain

Voila. 484 media and 726 sources.

Corpus is ready to feed our BI Analytic Tool and be our whitelist to imported in our DSP.

Questions? Shoot!

 

 

Brand Consistency > Brand Safety + Brand Suitability

Brands need more than Safety, more than Suitability.

Last year, 4A’s (the American Association of Advertising Agencies serves 700+ member agencies across 1,300 offices, which control more than 85% of total U.S. advertising spend) announced: ” Advertiser Protection Bureau Delivers Brand Suitability Framework and Brand Safety Floor In Move to Help Advertisers Assess Risk”

… and predicted “the content classifications will streamline the conversations between all parties regarding what placements are appropriate by brand.”

Unsurprisingly, we could not agree more.

“It is time to take brand safety to the third level or ‘brand care’ level…”

says Admantx, and continues “… one that gives far greater prominence to the meaning, context and potential implications of online content, specific to the actual brand’s needs.”

Again, we could not agree more.

That third level or brand care level is Brand Consistency.

Why Brand Consistency is so important?

Consistency Builds Brand Awareness
Brand Consistency Communicates Credibility
Consistency Makes Your Brand More Trustworthy
Consistency Helps Manage Perceptions
Consistency Takes Marketing to a New Level
Consistency Builds Brand Equity

This equity comes in part because of customer loyalty. Access Development gives the statistic that 86% of consumers say that loyalty is driven by trust. Twenty-six percent of consumers specifically call out “consistency” as part of this loyalty.

TrustedOut builds and preserves your Brand Consistency:

  • Manage lists from AI-profiled sources. Unbiased. Universal. Up-to-date.
  • Feed directly ad delivery systems 24/7/365.
  • Align centrally all lists per brands, regions, campaigns.
  • Optimize budgets using media profiles to detect most efficient media.

Contact us!

Business Case #4. Whitelisting.

 

Keeping your brand safe with AI-powered Whitelistings. Simple as 1-2-3.

ACME logo

1. Define publisher brands compatible with yours and your campaign.

ACME, the sports car maker we are using in our business cases and demos, wants to run an ad campaign for its new auto-pilot feature.

ACME is an high-end brand wanting to avoid risk and focus on sites knowledgeable in specifically targeted areas that are also specialized in own Transportation industry. This to make sure its brand new, super cool, technology will be well received.
The CMO defines the Corpus for this campaign as:

  • Make sure Media is not spotted as Fake news, nor Junk Science
  • Spoken language must be English
  • Ensure Media covers Economy & Enterprise, Finance, Politics, Law, Tech, Entertainment & Leasure and Lifestyle
  • Specifically select Media specialized in the Transportation Industry

The Corpus looks like this:

TrustedOut corresponding Corpus

2. Get your whitelist.

Simply click on “Get”

TrustedOut Corpus in Media and Sources
 

Select “Download” for a manual import or “Connect” to an automatic feeding.

TrustedOut Corpus in Media and Sources

3. Import your whitelist in your DSP. Done.

Of course, feel free to make any change to your Corpus and reimport the new whitelist to your dsp. We do recommend using the “Connect” option to make your change live. (only works with some partners)

Absolute Brand Safety. Optimal Business Achievements.

By running your programmatic within a whitelist defined by the marketeer in charge of the campaign, the brand is absolutely safe and your business KPI are optimal.

And remember:

Brand Safety Violations: Consumers question brand’s motives.

Fixing Brand Safety with AI-operated WhiteListing.

Want more business cases?

#1. Content Orientation | #2. Media metrics impact| #3. Country comparisons

Questions? Contact us!

How our AI-powered classification works.

We receive a lot of questions about how our AI-powered Classification is working, so we decided to make 2 drawings to explain how it works.

1. The Taxonomy.
Gauging the media from the Inside.
Including expertise and sensitivity.

A media has sources which each publishes new articles. From every new article, we solely keep useful words (no stop words such as “the, is, but…”) which we call an “abstract”.

Every single work of this new abstract is matched vs several hundreds of datasets. Every single classification in our taxonomy has its own dataset.

Each 1 million abstracts, this means 75,000,000,000 operations.

This method is close to the tribe model. Every tribe uses a dialect made of words signing this dialect. When you recognize a dialect, you recognize a tribe. Here is a classification. Depending on the number and the weight of words, we are able to gauge the level of expertise in the classification. This gives us a score for the article.

Playing with the length of past days, we can also gauge the sensitivity to news for the sources. Compiling sources tells us where the media stands.

Bottom line: We have a universal taxonomy, always updated and able to be filtered by expertise level and over 3 periods of time to sense time sensitivity (and trend forming, but we’ll tell you more real soon)

2. The Perceptions.
Gauging the media from the Outside.
How is a Media “spotted as”.

“Fake news”, “Junk science”, and other toxic appreciations are tangible. Rarely, can this be intangible (for sure), because those are up to appreciations. What is “fake news” to some people, is not for others. This is why we treat those appreciations as “spotted as”, or “perceived on the internet as”.

Same as for our taxonomy, perception is an appreciation, but where taxonomy is about the publisher itself, we call it the Publisher Inside, the perception is the Publisher Outside, or how the publisher is perceived for those terms.

To do this, we collect how the publisher is perceived on the Internet, strictly excluding any publisher properties.

This gives us pages and words which we match with Perception datasets (one for “fake news”, one for “junk science” and so on) in a similar way explained above.

We then have a score which when above a threshold make the publication “spotted as fake news” for example.

Bottom line: We sense how a publication is perceived as not one person or group can make any universal statement.

Questions? Shoot!

 

Almost 6 in 10 Canadians blame the United States on the effect of fake news in Canada

The survey — conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the Centre of International Governance Innovation — looked to gauge the opinions of 25,000 internet users across the world on internet security and trust. [ref article]

89% of Canadian internet users think social media is the main source of distrust in the internet.

Are you sharing this opinion? 

86% falling for fake news at least once.

And you?

“This year’s survey of global attitudes not only underscores the fragility of the internet, but also netizens’ growing discomfort with social media and the power these corporations wield over their daily lives,” said Fen Osler Hampson, a fellow at CIGI and director of its global security and politics program. 

Importance for Business Intelligence:
No trust, no Intelligence.

Distrust has a toll for individual, but also for businesses. Define Media Profiles You Trust, Get Content You Need.

Deliver Trustworthy and Smarter Social Intelligence.

Can you make strategic decisions on doubtful insights?

Questions? Contact us!

 

“Fake news” means almost nothing.

This post is inspired by this Washington Post article

3 Americans out of 4 believe traditional news organizations report “fake news.”…

This number came from a 2018 Monmouth University poll.

We will not comment or enter in the political argument but focus on the definition of what “fake news” means.

… but what does “fake news” mean?

“When you see the result, you don’t know what it means,” argued Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of American Press Institute, who has a background in polling with Pew Research.

“It could mean stories I don’t like, stories that are critical of a person I like, stories that have a factual error, stories that are fundamentally wrong, or stories made up out of whole cloth by pranksters or political propagandists,” he said.

Are “fake news” “factual coverage I don’t like”?

And if “fake news” includes “factual coverage that I don’t like,” it’s no wonder the negative numbers are so high. If it also includes “editorial decisions” that reflect negatively on a particular officeholder, it’s even less wonder.

It’s not about “fake”, it’s about “your definition of Trust”.

The level of trust on “Media I use” is 50% higher than Media in general.

… and your definition of trust is what TrustedOut is all about.

TrustedOut:
A database of AI-profiled Media.

”For analytics and brand safety,
what’s not Trusted In, can not be Trusted Out.”

Questions? Shoot!

 

People have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control.

Only 1 in 5 believes the system is working, and 1 in 2 thinks the reverse.

In this article, Why The Most Trusted Brands Will Also Be The Most Successful, Which-50 Media writes: “According to the authors (2019 Global Edelman Trust Index), “Trust has changed profoundly in the past year — people have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control.”. Indeed, the study revealed an urgent desire for change. “All [customers] share an urgent desire for change. Only one in five feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them.”

Why? Growing distrust in Media and Gov.

Distrust is, both in Media and Gov, and both in Europe and the US.

Reminder: Customers (readers) will give the most value to brands that they trust to do the right thing by them.

1/ Proof: 50% more trust on media I use vs media in general.

While distrust is general, trust definition is personal.

2/ Point: Consumer/reader Trust is Brand value.

Consumer trust is a vital and a key differentiator for publishers

3/ Caution: Hazardous ad placements impact brand value.

Brand Safety Violations: Consumers question brand’s motives.

Bottom line: CMOs must analyze and advertise on sites they trust.

Deliver Trustworthy and Smarter Social Intelligence.

Can you make strategic decisions on doubtful insights?

Fix Brand Safety with AI-operated WhiteListing.

Can you afford to put your brand at risk?

Questions? Contact us!

 

 

 

 

Adding News-Sensitivity in our Taxonomy.

Taxonomy classification over different periods for CNN Politics.

Brand Safety 2.0 is about brand values.

As we wrote in our previous post: “Brand Safety 1.0 was about toxic keywords, 2.0 adds brand values.”

Brand values are tangible. So must be media profiling.

To gauge brand values, which are made of tangible perceptions, the matching publisher brands must be profiled with content classification, using AI to be unbiased, universal and always up-to-date.

Our AI-based Taxonomy and massive data processing already allow universal taxonomy AND expertise depth…

We’ve presented, in previous posts, our universal taxonomy and its DNA view: “Media profiles are key to Business Intelligence and Advertising.”

… announcing today, new-sensitivity in taxonomy!

Playing with periods of time in the past, past week, past month, past quarter, we are now able to classify accordingly our classification and thus, here, our taxonomy.

In other words, depending on the marketeer project and brand values, TrustedOut will be able to deliver news-sensitive or stable media.

No UI yet, but we couldn’t keep this for ourselves, here’s how CNN – Politics looks like over past week, month and quarter.

A quick read is:

International:

… disappears from top 5 over the period of time of the past quarter (-90 days). This might be due Iran and trade war/mexico stuff. Depth is also getting lower with time.

Political party:

… goes lower with time.

Defense gets civil over time and Education and LGBTQ are very news sensitive. Disappear over time.

New UI and new killer feature coming up…

We will include news-sensibility in our Corpus definition and, teasing again, we’ll reveal a killer features using this brand new and unique capability,

Stay tuned.

Feel free to reach out if you have a question!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brand Safety 1.0 was about toxic keywords, 2.0 adds brand values.

Image result for white list

Challenging the definition of brand safety

In this article, Marketing Dive writes “While the industry settles on what brand safety means, companies are finding fresh ways to define the idea based on their individual values” and goes on:

“Brand safety is a highly nuanced concept, largely because each brand has a unique view as to what constitutes a safe ad placement.”

We could not agree more.

Articles add 2 interesting cases:

“The definition of controversial content also differs by brand, as illustrated by Nike’s decision to feature Colin Kaepernick in its 30th anniversary campaign last year. This contentious move was beneficial for Nike because the actions of the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback align with the brand’s progressive values, as demonstrated in the campaign slogan “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” A brand with more traditionalist or conservative values would steer clear of content relating to a controversial sports star for fear of damaging its reputation.

Equally, a brand such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, which took a strong stance in the national gun debate following the Parkland shooting, wouldn’t want to be associated with online content relating to violence or shootings. However, rival retailers that take a different view on the firearms debate may welcome a placement alongside a news story about gun crime to reinforce the need for their products. Ultimately, defining and executing brand safety is about being intentional and acting on a brand’s unique vision and values. This will inevitably be different for each company.”

Brand Safety 2.0 is about Brand values.

Brand Safety 1.0 was about having the brand protected at the content level with a query made of  “must-have” words and the “must-not-have” ones.

The tangible source-based intelligence.

Brand Safety 2.0 is about the brand values of the publisher to be in line with the brand values of the advertiser. This is tangible and requires evaluations.

Those evaluations must be unbiased, universal and always up-to-date. And to not be too limitative, have to be large and broadly cover a desired market. Consequently, only AI, Machine Learning can deliver and maintain this. No human curation can do and must not do.

We name this, Corpus Intelligence. The Corpus representing all materials used for a project: analytics, marketing, PR…

By providing desired and user-defined trustworthy content, Corpus Intelligence is the vital complement to any piece of content crunch, such as social intelligence (to feed products like Digimind, Synthesio, IBM Watson…) and Online Advertising Whitelisting (to feed trading desks, ad delivery platforms…)

An example? Let’s take MarketingDive.com

Let’s ask TrustedOut how Marketing dive is perceived to gauge what advertiser brand values are compatible? Here are the taxonomy classifications:

  • Top Categories
    General › Economy And Enterprise
    General › Economy And Enterprise › Marketing
    General › Economy And Enterprise › Advertising
    Industries › Information And Communication › Online Media
  • Specialized
    People › Lifestyle › Food And Beverage
    General › Tech › Digital Tech
  • Spotted as
    Fake News › No

Consequently, if your brand has values matching the above, MarketingDive.com will be in the whitelist TrustedOut will build for you and will feed your ad delivery platform. Within this whitelist, your programmatic query will add keywords selections.

Whitelisting and programmatic queries, both, make your brand totally safe.

Questions? Contact-us!