Tyson Foods | Impact Index

Marketers focus intensely on brand safety, but now need to evolve to the idea of “human safety.” We endeavored to create technology that assesses the human impact of digital content on marginalized and misrepresented communities. And as such, enable our client, Tyson Foods, to invest media dollars more impactfully. 

Insight

Media shapes opinions. Opinions inform individual behaviors. Individual behaviors influence cultural outcomes.

Whether we like it or not, brands have a responsibility for funding the toxicity crisis online and in the world—and the growth of our brands is tied to the content we surround.

The problem is the public at large is still being exposed to incendiary rhetoric and misinformation and a great deal has been directed at the Black community. That same rhetoric and misinformation – from dog whistles to unconscious bias – has left the Black community vulnerable. Meanwhile, keyword block lists and exclusion lists that lack nuance have excluded tangible and factual news. For example, one publisher shared that content around George Floyd and Black Lives Matter was monetized at a 57% lower rate than other news content because of keyword blocking.

Since the ad industry funds billions of dollars in content with real ramifications for people, we saw an opportunity to keep journalism, specifically editorial media, accountable to the Black community. And in the process, better connect with Black consumers on behalf of Tyson, who has previously pledged to invest more media dollars for the Black community.

Idea

To understand and improve the impact that our media buys have on the Black community, we developed an AI-based human safety tool, which we called the Impact Index.

The Impact Index combs the articles within our media mix and across the open web, assessing and quantifying their human impact on the Black community, and optimizing our media spend accordingly in real-time. This also allows us to derive insights about our plans and the human impact of editorial content to help us intentionally invest across Tyson’s future media plans.

We launched the tool and used it to quantify the human impact our media investments can have on the Black community and optimize paid media spending accordingly.

Execution

To build the Impact Index, we partnered with socialcontext.ai, an AI start-up backed by academics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Together, we developed an algorithm that can examine articles at the page-level and make decisions across thousands of publisher sites in real-time.

While other industry offerings like Newsguard rank news publishers broadly, the Impact Index makes domain-level decisions on page-level data—ranking individual news articles across thousands of publisher sites on a scale from Positive Impact to Toxic Impact on the Black community. These categories are defined as such:

– Positive Impact: content that’s uplifting or celebrating the Black community.

– Neutral Impact: content that is neither positive or negative; oftentimes lifestyle content.

– Negative Impact: content that refers to criminal, anti-social, or non-normative behavior.

– Toxic Impact: content that invokes negative stereotypes, belittling or is purposely distrustful of the Black community.

Through these classifications, we gained insight about the type of content to surround, and what to avoid. For example, we learned the most common form of bias is in local news, where some local news publishers often “boost the signal” of negative news pertaining to the Black community. Meanwhile, lifestyle sites boosted positive stories, but generally with little impact on the Black community.

We then fed this data into our proprietary media planning and optimization tools to optimize current media plans and inform future media activations.

Using bidding technology through The Trade Desk, we prioritized positive sentiment sites across Tyson’s campaign to over-engineer impressions toward Positive Impact media.

Results

We made an impact on the resulting media plan, increasing Tyson’s media volume on Positive sentiment sites by 20%.

We made an impact on the brand, driving 2x increase in clicks and brand site engagement (e.g. where to buy, product detail page) vs. historical benchmarks.

We made an impact on the journalistic community, helping to fund credible journalism to serve an underrepresented voice through our optimization toward more intentional investment.

We made an impact on the media ecosystem, with the Impact Index being awarded the prestigious Racial Equity Grant from WPP to continue developing the tool for broader use and for other marginalized communities in service of a more equitable, less toxic media ecosystem.