Seekr and Oxford Road Launch Groundbreaking Civility Score for Podcasts

Seekr, a revolutionary artificial intelligence company specializing in transparent content evaluation, and Oxford Road, the leading independent ad agency in audio, today announced the launch of the first-ever Civility Score for podcasts. Seekr’s Civility Score harnesses proprietary AI to offer brand marketers a more precise way to measure brand suitability in podcast advertising, maximizing brand affinity and return on investment.

“As the marketplace becomes more open to objective, third-party assessments of media content, the Civility Score provides brands with a simple-to-understand and extraordinarily effective way to protect themselves from high-risk content,” said Pat Condo, CEO and Founder of Seekr Technologies. “It is a tool designed to move beyond the traditional brand safety and suitability frameworks and strike at the heart of the polarization problem.”

Seekr’s Civility Score will use AI to objectively measure ad hominem attacks within the nation’s top podcasts – a key contributor to societal polarization and aggression. Brands can use the detailed scoring to guide their media planning, setting tolerance levels that maintain brand integrity and minimize exposure to potentially damaging content. Specifically, key features of the Civility Score include:

• Civility Ranking: Seekr scores podcasts from low to high civility based on the level of personal attack in each show, factoring in context and nuance when presence of an attack is found.
• Risk Trends: Seekr tracks civility trends to allow brands to adjust their media spend accordingly and align with quality content.
• Detailed Metrics: Seekr provides metrics on the amount and nature of personal attacks found in evaluated show content per hour, giving brands detailed data to speed up the evaluation process.

The Civility Score scans podcast episodes in their entirety, enabling it to spot instances of ad hominem attacks that occur at any point in a program, so brands can avoid getting caught in the crossfire. This also identifies instances where topics of discussion may not be inherently controversial and therefore not covered by GARM’s 12-point Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework.

“We’re proud to have partnered with tech firms in the past to bring content evaluation solutions to the audio space,” said Dan Granger, CEO and Founder of Oxford Road. “Still, what the industry needs most is one metric that transcends subjectivity and promotes a value around which we can all align: respect for others. The strength of the Civility Score is its simplicity, as all brands, consumers, and creators can align around this expression of the Golden Rule. Now, we can reward the most responsible voices, rather than those that are simply the loudest.”

The launch of the Civility Score will take place at the Chief Audio Officer Summit, an event that brings together marketers from the leading brands in audio. Initially, the Civility Score will focus on podcasts, with plans to expand its scope to provide broader applications in all forms of media.

For further information or custom solutions, visit https://www.seekr.com/.