Outrage is often the fuel that powers social media. We all know this. A person may proclaim their love for bananas and it’s only a matter of time before someone else is in the comments section, accusing them of hating apples. For the day-to-day user this kind of annoyance is just that, an annoyance. But for a brand, outrage can be a kiss of death. Sometimes it’s because of actions they’ve taken themselves, or even misunderstandings of actions they’ve taken, like the recent controversy with Wendy’s and surge pricing.
Sometimes, though, that outrage is due to a brand collaborating with an influencer who says or does things that aren’t in alignment with the brand’s ethics. Everyone remembers when Disney signed, and then unsigned, PewDiePie for antisemitic comments that occurred years before Disney ever knew who he was. Since then, every brand wants to know exactly who they’re collaborating with before they sign an influencer to avoid having to eat a whole lot of public crow like Disney did.
A handful of platforms that we’ve reviewed over the years include something like a “brand safety” score. The names differ from platform to platform, but they all generally work the same way. You'll see some metric that gives you a quick yes-or-no determination as to whether hiring a given influencer might be harmful to your brand. These are good features to have on an influencer marketing platform, but they often don't go far enough. And for some companies, they go too far—one brand’s trash is another brand's treasure. These tools lack nuance and configurability, and that one-size-fits-all approach almost makes them more hassle than they're worth, but it's better than nothing.
A few years ago, Viral Nation built a standalone tool to accomplish exactly what brands have been clamoring for. As an influencer marketing agency that's been at the forefront of the industry—pretty much since their founding—the people at Viral Nation have worked with some of the biggest brands around. From this experience, they know that not all offensive posts are created equally. A children’s clothing brand probably doesn’t want content featuring adults drinking alcohol, but you know who would? An alcohol brand. VN Secure was built on the premise that only the brands can determine who is safe to work with, but they still need software to monitor influencers at scale.
Though primarily known as an agency, this is not Viral Nation's first foray into building its own software. The in-house system they developed to manage their own influencer talent pool and campaigns, Influsoft, is now one of the most highly rated platforms on our site. When we reviewed it after its initial launch we noted that Viral Nation’s “thing” seemed to be including “features that you’ve seen elsewhere and taking them further.” Well, in the case of VN Secure, they went even further than further, taking a familiar feature and making a robust solution out of it.
Summary:
Pricing
VN Secure is software-as-a-service, so you'll access it through the web and pay a subscription fee like you would with any other SaaS platform. Because it's purpose-built to do one thing, there aren't different plans or levels of subscription that get you more features the more you pay. You either use VN Secure, or you do not.
Pricing is customized for each client, based on the size and scope of their business and marketing.
The Details
The basic premise of VN Secure is a simple one: look through an influencer’s entire history of content to look for red flags that could tarnish a brand’s reputation by association. Let’s clarify what an entire history of content is, because that could mean just about anything. And it does mean just about everything: all video, audio, images, and text are ingested by VN Secure from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, and The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. To do this without software would be, in a word, impossible.
To understand just how impossible, take this example of one of VN Secure’s clients—a major brand that wanted to vet more than 70,000 influencers at once. The video content included in this dataset, if played start to finish, would have been 23 years long (yes: years). Instead, VN Secure’s AI-powered algorithms processed it all in just over 4 months. Understand that AI isn’t just able to recognize words: beyond looking for offensive terms/hate speech/etc, it can also process visual elements and flag violence and nudity, for example.
Unlike other platforms with a “brand safety” feature, Viral Nation seems to understand that different brands have different thresholds for moral pain. Disney couldn’t be associated with Pewdiepie after his antisemitic comments in 2017, but it didn’t hurt Gfuel to sign him to a contract a couple years later. It’s all relative. With that in mind, Brands can define their tolerances in VN Secure’s settings, and with an impressive amount of precision. It’s not just a matter of feeding the software specific things that you want to avoid. Instead, you can go through different categories of possible offenses—drug use, alcohol use, nudity, swearing—and set individual tolerances for each.
Beyond that, there are also a number of templates available that brands can build on so that it isn’t just as simple as saying “I’m 100% tolerant of gambling content.” VN Secure also gives you the ability to weigh each category relative to the others. If you weigh nudity as more important to screen out than gambling, poker content makes it through, whereas strip poker does not.
The platform's usefulness doesn’t end at this ingestion. It isn’t just about not avoiding partnerships with people who’ve posted questionable content in the past. VN Secure also monitors every influencer you’ve fed it, in real time, and continues to apply all the same rules for flagging offenses. A new addition to the platform’s categories of unwanted content is copyrighted music. Copyright infringement is a huge liability for brands, but influencers are often given free reign to post. Here, brands get an alert when one of their collaborators posts copyrighted music long before they’ll ever get served by the copyright holder for infringement.
The beauty of the templates is that they’re detailed enough to function with precision but loose enough that they can be used strictly for social listening purposes, too. The platform assigns no moral value to any content—you can let it know a bunch of profane words you want to be alerted to, but you’re not limited to possibly offensive things. By configuring keywords into a template, you can monitor any public social account for mentions of whatever is you want to look for: your brand name, CEO’s name, competitor mentions—you name it. Any time you’ve flagged something for VN Secure to alert you, it shows up in the reporting module.
What’s also cool is that, while the software is only flagging and showing you posts that meet your criteria, it still went through and indexed everything in the profiles it analyzes. There's a search bar within the reporting page that allows you to look for literally anything that may have appeared in a person's post. If you were a marketer for Coke, you could run a search for Pepsi and find out if your influencer is a no-good backstabber with bad taste in soda. What's more, Viral Nation can customize the software for you, so that these “off-label” uses can be built into the reporting, and incidents of “Pepsi” show up automatically.
For any of these alerts, the platform does an excellent job of bringing you receipts. That is, it doesn’t just say “Hey, someone threw a middle finger at the camera in this video” and leave it to you to find it. The offending action is always timestamped, with it being a matter of a simple click to get you to that moment. If the video has narration or dialogue, the platform transcribes all that for you to read through if you want. But it will also flag anything in that text, making it obvious where and when someone said something. It can also catch actual text that appears on screen as well, even if it’s just flashing by or tiny and in the background. Click on the text in the report’s alerts, and you’re brought to the correct moment in the video.
Conclusion
Brands are becoming increasingly vigilant about who they choose to partner with, and this is the one aspect of influencer marketing with a surprising lack of tools to address it. They could do their own research, but that essentially amounted to scrolling through the recent past and looking for obvious signs of questionable content. They could rely on some kind of safety score from whatever software they were using to know whether or not a partnership would be a good idea with someone. But those only tell you if there's a problem, they don't tell you what the problem is. And they're certainly not on the lookout for any issues in the future.
For the past few years, though, there has been a solution that delivers on the promise of brand safety: VN Secure. It’s an elegant implementation of artificial intelligence, in that it can ingest and analyze data far faster and more accurately than humans—but it doesn’t really make any ethical decisions. Morality isn’t something that can be programmed, and Viral Nation was smart not to try. Instead they built code to let the machines do what they do well while leaving the ethical decisions to humans. Insert your own punchline about that here if you wish, but we’re still much better than machines at navigating the gray area of ethics and appropriate content.
VN Secure
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Features
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Ease of Use
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Reporting