Firms Launch Brands Misinformation Risk Index

Audience intelligence platform Pulsar has partnered with NewsGuard, which rates the trustworthiness of news sources, to launch the Misinformation Risk Index: Brands.

Earlier this year, the two companies launched an integration to detect early signals of misinformation, measure the impact of those narratives on public opinion, and help PR and marketing professionals respond quickly to protect their brands' reputation. Building on this integration, the new weekly index is designed to give brand managers and comms professionals guidance on which brands are seeing the most exposure on news and blogs which NewsGuard deems 'untrustworthy'.

The index ranks the top 25 'most valuable' global brands (as measured by Interbrand last year) on a relative scale every week. By combining NewsGuard's Reliability Rating with Pulsar's proprietary visibility metric, the firms say the index can be used to illustrate both the extent of each brand's potential exposure to misinformation, and to what degree this exposure is growing over time. A NewsGuard Reliability Rating takes into account nine standards of credibility and transparency, including disclosing its ownership and correcting errors; while Pulsar's Visibility Score calculates the reach and impact of a particular piece of content by factoring in audience size, engagement, format, amongst other metrics.

The firms say that the index is not a measure of the 'negative' or 'positive' publicity a brand may have received; explaining that it is entirely possible that a brand could be covered in a positive way by unreliable sources or, conversely, that a brand could be covered negatively (for a product defect, for example) by reliable sources. Rather, it is a measure of possible reputation risk in the sense that a brand receiving attention from unreliable sources has a higher risk of unreliable information being conveyed about it.

Web sites: www.pulsarplatform.com and www.newsguardtech.com .