AI Platform Rolls Out New Tracking Features for Digital Video

Campaigns are losing track of their digital narratives. A startup is trying to fix that.

ClarifyAI, which was launched last year by the nonpartisan artificial intelligence lab Ground Truth AI as a way for campaigns to track online narratives, is rolling out a pair of new products intended to help campaigns track emerging trends and narratives in organic media – predominantly YouTube – that traditional monitoring and reporting tools often miss. 

The reality, Ground Truth AI’s CEO Andrew Eldredge-Martin said, is that candidates and brands often control less than 10 percent – and in some cases, less than 5 percent – of the narratives about their campaigns. It’s a challenge that’s only gotten more difficult as more and more Americans turn to highly fragmented online platforms, like YouTube, for news and information. 

“We need new tools to understand what’s going on,” Eldredge-Martin told Campaigns & Elections. “On a traditional campaign, you have a paid media analysis showing red lines and blue lines…but tracking the narrative across the total landscape is now more important than tracking the paid media for most of the time that a campaign is active.” 

The new products from ClarifyAI include the Clustering Engine, which aggregates narratives from thousands of digital videos into related “clusters” to help users understand massive amounts of data, and RADAR – short for Rapid Analysis of Digital Attention & Reputation – which delivers automated, ratings-based reports to campaign inboxes.

The idea, according to Ground Truth AI’s CTO Brian Sokas, emerged last fall as a way to help make sense of the large number of online videos that the company analyzed.

“Some of these reports would be tens of thousands of rows long, and then we would analyze the content ourselves and provide that research to our customers,” Sokas said. That was great, but it also became problematic to an extent, because it’s really hard to go through tens of thousands of lines of a spreadsheet.”

The tools are just one response to a broader challenge for campaigns: the fragmentation of the media environment. 

A study released last year by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that, for the first time, social media had overtaken television as Americans’ top news source. At the same time, survey data from Pew Research Center shows that YouTube is the most widely used social media platform among U.S. adults. 

Monitoring media narratives isn’t new for campaigns. Media consumption has always driven public opinion, Eldredge-Martin acknowledged. The problem, he argued, is that media monitoring technology hasn’t kept up with modern consumption habits. 

“People receive information and it shapes their perception of the topics that are discussed,” he said. “To a communicator or a campaign strategist, that’s not a surprising statement. We’ve been doing that all along. What’s different now is where the reach and the frequency of these messages is coming from.”