Mindshare: Impact Index

The media industry controls more than half a trillion in spend per year. We have a responsibility to ensure those dollars are being spent in a way that not only helps brands, but the world around us. 

Mindshare launched the Impact Index, an AI human safety tool that examines the social impact of editorial content on historically underrepresented communities.  

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 across Positive Impact, to Neutral Impact, to Negative Impact, to Toxic Impact on the communities in question. We partnered with socialcontext.ai, a contextual intelligence startup that’s backed by academics at the University of Colorado Boulder, to get to this level of granularity. 

We launched the tool in partnership with our first-mover client Tyson Foods, and used it to quantify the human impact that their media investments can have on the Black community, and optimise paid media spend accordingly. And, the Impact Index is one of the modules within Synapse, Mindshare’s unified analytics platform, so now we’re able to work with brands to understand the relationships between investing in different grades of content and campaign/business outcomes as well.  

"Brands and ad placements have an impact on consumers, be it consciously or subconsciously," says Jared Greene, director of Invention+ at Mindshare, who co-led the launch of the Impact Index. "A tool like the Impact Index is a positive step in addressing the role human well-being plays in creating our media plans, and our ambition to make media more intentional and equitable for all consumers."