Companies today are grappling with a monumental challenge: the relentless accumulation of data. According to the latest estimates, 328.77 million terabytes of data are created each day. Around 120 zettabytes of data will be generated this year, an almost incomprehensible amount.
Every sector, from industry giants to small businesses, confronts the daunting task of managing this deluge of text, audio, and video content, to name a few formats.
Managing internal and external data helps companies glean market insights, drive innovation and, importantly, protect against business risk. For instance, it allows them to monitor brand conversations to stay ahead of negative sentiment, whether directly from customers or indirectly from partners. Concerns about brand safety and suitability is a serious enough problem that marketers, media agencies, and their respective industry associations created the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to tackle the issue.
Discovering, and monitoring, brand mentions for suitability has recently become one of the primary use cases for AI technology. With data creation accelerating at an unprecedented pace and showing no signs of slowing down, more and more companies are leaning on AI to detect brand suitability red flags and ultimately prevent reputational risk.
While companies in all industries face the challenge of managing this ever-increasing amount of data, the level of potential risk varies. It’s one thing to use technology to glean that customers are making fun of an advertising campaign, but quite another to pick up a conversation around product safety, or to discover that the host of the podcast you’ve partnered with to promote your brand is openly sharing ideas that go against company values.
Most companies want to avoid these problems for the fear of losing customers they have spent so much time and money to acquire. But for highly-regulated industries in the U.S. such as financial services, insurance, and pharmaceuticals, unsavory brand impressions can have even more devastating and long-lasting effects on a company’s reputation and bottom line—and can lead to prolonged regulatory scrutiny.
That helps to explain why only a few months ago biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences and New York University Langone Hospital immediately took action to suspend advertising on X when the nonprofit Media Matters for America flagged that their ads were appearing next to content celebrating Hitler and the Nazi party. Financial services company RBS took similar action in 2017 when The Times found its ads also appeared next to extremist content.
