← Embracing Marketing Mistakes
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- [00:00]
A
This morning's event is called Protecting your brand in the age of AI misinformation. And I'm hoping that you find you guys get a lot out of this because we have done a few workshops with clients on AI crisis management. We used to do a lot of stuff around social media crisis management. Will and I do quite a bit of media training too. So today's event sort of combines all that, but we also got some entertaining videos in here and some really useful stuff and a process that Will's going to talk about later. Right. So, yeah, as I said, this is protecting your brand in the age of misinformation and what we're going to cover in the next 60 minutes. We've got a couple of slides on us, but that's it. Don't worry just about who we are. So who prohibition is, why AI misinformation matters in 2026, why brands can lose control so quickly. I mean, it was quick in social media, but in the era of AI, it's bonkers. Just look at how many blooming AI tools are coming out. They released Chat GPT 5.3, not last week, and the day after they released ChatGPT 5.4. So, yeah, it's a bit of an AI space race, so it's good to just stay on top of these things. We've got some case studies and some industry learnings. We've got plenty of entertaining case studies as well, so you get to laugh at other people's misfortunes or not. And then when AI hits. So how to fight back, which Will's going to cover and sort of the first 24 hours. So my name is Chris Norton, I'm the innovation lead. I'm massively into AI, working on several different bespoke tools, both for clients and for ourselves. And obviously it's the area of technology. Technology and strategy is where I love to be. So. But I'm the founder of the AGENC agency and, yeah, that's me. So, Will.
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B
Yeah. Hi, everyone, I'm Will. I. I tend to look after creative and strategy in the agency. I also do a lot of crisis management training and what I'm going to talk about in the second half of this is how crisis plans, which never used to take into consideration social media, now need to also take into consideration AI. So essentially your crisis plan needs to evolve and we're very much of the view that we need to be proactive when it comes to misinformation, not reactive. Definitely a hot topic, isn't it, Chris? And one we're having many more conversations about with our clients every week.
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A
Yeah. Will and I hosted a bespoke AI session with a client on misinformation and crisis and the brand will have to remain nameless, but it's a global brand and they shared from around the globe several different examples of things that had happened to them. And then we picked a few bespoke ones that we created as well. So we're doing workshops on this sort of stuff. Oh, well, you've just shared that poll.
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B
I've immediately pressed the wrong button. I was just going to say I'm going to be publishing various polls as we go throughout this. So by all means ask questions in the chat and if you can let us know your. Your views in the polls as well, I'll be then looking at the results at the halfway point.
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A
Yeah, so yeah, we're. But we're prohibition. We help ambitious brands grow faster. So we work with everyone from Oxford University. Barber, Goldsmiths, Jewelers, Rolex, Fentimans, Yorkshire Water. We're based in leeds in the UK. The agency, we've got 28 consultants but we do everything. I'm from a PR background but tech and PR, which is why I've always been into social media and AI and all these different things that come from tech. Love that area. But we're a consumer and B2B agency. We're sort of 60% consumer and 40% B2B. I've got B2B team. The different things that we offer in terms of services, we offer what we call a growth catalyst, which is sort of demand generation campaigns. So we help people to get better traction in a category if that's what they're after. We also do, which is kind of where this area is reputation guardians. So we're proactive and reactive. We can help a client with crisis management, either online, offline, whatever that is. We've been involved in tons of those. We also do what's called a launch ignition. So if you've got a product launch or you've got to launch a service or something, we can help you do that in terms of video, print, broadcast, whatever that is, basically to help a client take away the hassle of launching a new product and then the final service that we do is like a behavioral shift. So we work with quite a few charities as well and in education. So because they're two of our areas of expertise as well and we like to help out. We've got a reduced rate for charities. But yeah, we like to help shift behavior where possible. So it's like influencing. We've put here medium term attitudes but you can basically do all sorts at scale and we help a client to do that. Let's get into the good stuff then. Why does AI misinformation matter in 2026? Well, you need to mute mate, because I can hear all your typing. AI misinformation erodes customer trust. Um, it creates product confusion. So if you've got a product, a great example was if somebody does a, does a fake video of your product and we've, I've seen examples of that already and I'm going to show some examples of where that can really cause a problem. Increases react reactive workload. Yeah, I mean if something you, you're not in control of this. None of us are in control of if, if an AI video or fake individual springs up, it's, it's difficult. You've got to react and be able to react and the ability prepared and react is why you might want to have a clear plan of what you're going to do. And obviously a plan has got to be quite flexible because all sorts of bits and pieces, outside variables are outside of your control. It can dilute your brand tone. So I'm going to show you a couple of examples of where clients have done campaigns and they've actually gone out of their control. So it's affected the brand, it raises reputational risk and in, in a modern era, in 2026, reputation's worth more than anything. If you've got, if you haven't got a reputation, you're ruined basically in terms of stock price or whatever it is, it undermines visual storytelling, especially if it's, it can help storytelling as well, AI but obviously with misinformation, not so much. And it can damage credibility by association. So even though you haven't done it and it's about, it's about a brand or a category that's similar to you, it can affect you by association. So AI misinformation is now constant. It's happening all the time, like constantly. Like hacking is. It's cheap, really cheap, it's getting cheaper by the day and it's convincing. Like if you sat there thinking, oh yeah, I can tell an AI video. I'm going to show a couple of examples where you can, you know the McDonald's example I've got in a minute, you'll see and you're like, oh yeah, I can see that's AI but that's a year ago. Things are moving on. Brands are expected to respond instantly. So everything's Instant thanks to the Amazon effects. We want delivery tomorrow. We want delivery with it. Yeah, we want delivery tomorrow. And now within eight hours. We expect everything to be done within 24 hours. And silence is often interpreted as failure. So if you just let something happen. Sometimes silence can be a good thing. But often in this sort of space. Excuse me, I'm glad you found that amusing, Will. Silence is interpreted as failure. Only 9% of consumers feel confident identifying a deep fake. So, yeah, less than 10% of people feel confident in identifying, identifying a deep fake. And in some of our workshops I was showing the Tupac Shakur ones with Tupac and Michael Jackson rapping together. You know, obviously you know that they're fake, but a lot of the time you can't tell. So. And just to show you this isn't a deep fake. This is just to show you something where that I prepared. This took me about a minute to prepare. And this is if I wanted to call Will on the phone. Hi Will, it's Chris. I have just had a call from a supplier and they need us to pay for some event costs up front. I am out and about at the moment, if you don't mind. Can just pay them online by bax for me. Their account number is 789987 and sort code is 203862. The amount is £24,999. Thanks for helping me out, mate. I owe you one. Now.
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B
Did I pay it? That's the question.
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A
You would as well, probably. Although you're pretty tight, so I doubt it. Yeah, so the point there is you can tell, I would imagine. I mean, we did a podcast where me and Will had fake, me and him, and we told people it wasn't. Now obviously that was done for a 30 second clip of my voice, but if you put in like an hour's clip, it's going to have more interactions and the right inflections at the right places and sound more emotional. That took me two minutes to do. So if someone can send you a member of Your staff, a WhatsApp from a number that they don't recognize. I've lost my phone, sorry. Can you send me this? You can see how easy it is to deepfake. And that was free as well as a free test. But the point is you could do that in five minutes. So 27%. So more than a quarter of generative AI misuse is devoted to shaping public opinion. That's according to the Financial Times. I mean, you could argue that there's a whole thing In America. America have got a behavioral science team that specialize in nudge. Whether that's misinformation or whatever, there is a team dedicated and they apparently when we interviewed someone on the podcast, they told me that they copied the uk, which was quite interesting. UK was the first to have a nudge behavioral science team. And it can be done for positives such as a great thing with getting vaccinated, et cetera, or negatives to get you to spend your money. So trust has shifted then customers now trust screenshots, peer to peer sharing. So think WhatsApp and think the message. I've just shared you visual evidence. Often you believe what you see and people are becoming more skeptical, which is a good thing. We need to be more skeptical. Influencers. People believe influencers more than ever. Hence why we've got an influencers event later on in the year. They're still really effective because it's content that's not generated by a brand. Private platforms drive belief faster and mainstream.
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B
Now.
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A
I was actually at the weekend I went to watch Back to the Future, the musical, which is absolutely brilliant, by the way. Best thing I've ever seen on stage. I've seen loads and loads of different things, but brilliant. Totally shocked because I thought it was gonna be rubbish. But we took my son. Anyway, the point is, this is a little clip I've got from Back to the Future with a twist. So this is Back to the Future, but not Marty McFly is Tom Holland and. And Doc is Robert Downey Jr. Night.
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B
Are you okay? I'm sorry.
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C
Come on. Isn't he a dreamboat?
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B
God, she didn't even look at him. This is more serious than I thought. Apparently your mother is amorously infatuated with
- [11:41]
A
you instead of your father. This is a message from the show's sponsors. Prohibition pr. We're Yorkshire's biggest PR agency and we specialize in delivering amazing video content and podcasting content. And we guarantee we can get your podcast, whether new or created by us, or if you've already got one, into a top 20 category in any country. Just drop me a line if you're interested in that. But meanwhile, we've got loads and loads of free stuff. We've got an entire events catalog packed for you with more than 15 webinars available free and on demand. Whenever you want to watch them or listen to them, it's me and the lovely Will talking through all sorts of topics from social media, public relations, content marketing, video execution, you name it, we talk about it. And we've also got two Live events coming up both in June, July. So the June and July ones is from creators to closers. It's all about influencer marketing and influencer ambassadorship and all that. We've got another event in September and October called how to create scroll stopping content that convert. Bit of a mouthful but amazing. All completely free. So if you want to come along to our events for free, this is your bag. You enjoy the show. First of all, give us a like and subscribe and please, please give us a review because we've got about 20 and we've got like 365,000 downloads so it'd be nice to hear from you. I'll give you a shout out but if you want to listen, if you want to register for the events, you can go to prohibitionpr.co.uk and click on upcoming events. Really easy to do, register and yeah, Will and I will see you there and we'll have a chat with you. So thanks for listening, we really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoy the show. So the point there is that's a whole clip on YouTube which we can send afterwards. The timing, I don't know is a little bit. It's fine actually when you watch it online but obviously there's a little bit of a lag. But the timing is perfect. The point is they've swapped the characters to be and that can be done seamlessly so you cannot tell completely different actors. It's crazy what it. And it was all to show the risks for Hollywood and deep fakes. It's a real problem and the truth is Hollywood brands, we're losing control a bit of the narrative and how to do that. So why are brands losing control? Well, creation is instant. It is so fast. There was a Tom Cruise video that I shared on one of our workshops recently and that was from about four years ago and it needed a high end AI special. It was a high end visual specialist. It took him ages. But they used a Tom Cruise impersonator and it was Tom Cruise, right? That was four years ago. Now you can do it instantly and that's the problem is that it's just so instant and you don't need an expert to do it because the technology has just got better and better or worse. Depends on how you see it. Paid media accelerates reach so they can create a video and they can put some hundred dollars behind it and before you know it it's got to 10,000 views. Especially if it's entertain shocking, which a lot of AI videos can be. They're often provocative in nature. Screenshots outlive takedowns. If there's a problem, you want something taken down, you could object to. It could take 24, 48 hours to have it taken down. But often people just take a screenshot and share it and then it's on the Internet forever. Private channels are invisible. So yeah, that we used to call that dark social, but you've got private channels and it's often political, are humorous so you can't really control it. And humor, we know, or political creates anger and outrage, the stuff that does the best, which is why they would use it. So how does AI spread then? Well, it creates believable content that you, you're genuinely watching, thinking, is that real? Is that not real? I know you'll be scratching your head thinking of things that you've seen recently. You're not sure if it's real or not, especially some of the Iran stuff. That's terrible obviously, but some of that is not real as well paid and organic amplification, screenshot capture which we've covered, private sharing. And then your brand reacts. So that's kind of how it occurs. It's sort of believable content. It gets amplified. Somebody screenshots it, it gets shared multiple times on WhatsApp and then right at the end it's been going viral for five hours. You spot it and someone's tagged you in it and the brand reacts and by then the damage could be done. So it's understanding the risk, the trends and emerging threats to make sure that we don't get caught in a compromising situation. So what are the key AI threats and trends then? Well, let's start from the top and we'll work round the clock there. So we've got fake influencers and AI Personas. That's a thing already. We've got voice cloning and audio deep fakes which I just showed you, a voice clone of myself to will that took 30 seconds to make. Well, it took a 30 second clip of audio to make. And if you've got a video online, if you're talking, they can make a video of you. They can make a deep fake, deep fake video ads which we're going to show some examples of in a minute. So celebrities being used in videos that aren't necessarily correct. Search generated misinformation. So articles that are created to create misinformation, classic tool in, used in propaganda and war and stuff like that. Fake reviews, people using fake reviews on Amazon or wherever or hotels to discredit other restaurants or hospitality. That's A that's a problem in itself. Scam events that you sign up for, pay a registration fee, you go to attend and guess what? It's not there. Brand impersonation. So people impersonating your brand, setting up the same URL as yours with a hyphen or with a dot org or with a dot, you can keep going. Seen tons of those and we've got ways to beat that in our crisis sessions and then global regulator pressure as well. So there's some of your key threats. So what are the challenges then? Well, AI tools are widely accessible and they're updated every day. It's a space race. One platform brings out a new tool, then the next day another platform matches it. Deep fake quality has surged. It's brilliant. I mean it's difficult. I've seen a few videos where I've been like is that real? Is that not real? I do think that these social channels need to get on this. I think they can use technology to improve it. Meta in particular could pull. You know, there should be some governance around this, but it's not there yet. Algorithms reward high engagement. And when we say algorithms, if you imagine a TikTok video, people get paid for views, they get paid for engagement. So if they get loads and loads of engagement, they're going to plug loads of videos that anything that's going to get engagement and if they can create with an AI prompt they're going to do so or something controversial. People like to be controversial, you know, for any old reason just to just to get engagement and then to sell products off the back of it. Consumers are overloaded with content. That's true. There's so much content, much more, more is flooding onto the Internet and regulations I've put, hasn't it should be. Haven't caught up. They just haven't caught up. Regulations are still miles behind and they always will be with something like this, I think but they need to get on top of it. Multi market brands face amplified exposure. So yeah, if you're in multi different several different territories around the world like some of our clients are, it's a real risk because something can pop up in a territory that's not as well protected and we've seen that problem already. So According to Experian, 64% of businesses reported experiencing rising fraud losses including this is including AI attacks. So riding fraud losses, that's like hacking and AI attacks in 2026 already and 35% of businesses were targeted by AI related fraud. So a third in Q1 last year, that's up from 23% the previous year. And you can be guaranteed at the end of this quarter it will be up again this year because it's easy and cheaper to do. So let's look at when the Internet has used its humor to hijack a brand campaign. We all love a marketing campaign. Here's a campaign from Walker's that used Gary Lineker as their. Obviously, that is the spokesperson and they used him to create videos and people could then upload their picture and it would be a bespoke video campaign. But the Internet just got involved and this is what happened. Thanks for joining the Walkers Wave and celebrating the UEFA Champions League final.
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B
Nice selfie.
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A
Here you are uniting with other fans
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outside the National Stadium of Wales.
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A
The Walker's Wave, a thing of beauty, as you can imagine. There's another one just before that, but I'll let this bit play. Yeah. So basically there was. It was Rolf Harris, it was Jimmy Savile, tons of them. Basically the Internet was just having a bit of fun with it and unfortunately, Walker's lost control of the campaign. Then you've got Jet2, the Jet2 meme. For those of you. I mean, Jet2 has gone everywhere with that. The quote from the lady, nothing beats a jet to holiday. So then people started sharing the worst situations possible on holidays. For Jet2, nothing beats a jet to holiday. And right now you can save £50 per person, that's £200 off. And then the next one, nothing beats a jet to holiday. And right now you can save 50 pounds per person, 200 pounds off for
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C
a family of four.
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A
He looks in genuine distress. So the point is, you can't control your campaigns as much as you wanted to anyway. But with AI, you can do even more. So there's organizational challenges, there's a private risk assessment for digital. So private risk assessment for digital campaigns is crucial. So when you're doing a digital campaign, maybe thinking, could this go awry? What could people upload and cause trouble? But even the most positive campaigns can be hijacked and changed. Importance of real time tracking and monitoring. Yeah, you've got to stay on top of it to decide whether you want to continue. So when we. I said before that we had deep faked audio. We've got Deepfake videos as well. So those of you that will know this Guy, this is Mr. Beast, is the biggest YouTuber on the planet and he makes a lot of revenue in the millions for his videos. But an AI deepfake video of him appeared saying that you could get an iPhone for $2, which just seemed ridiculously cheap, directing viewers to phishing sites. So then put their details in, they'd capture the data and then lo and behold, you'd get, you'd get ripped off. Here's the video and see what you think.
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If you're watching this video, you're one of the 10,000 lucky people who'll get an iPhone 15 Pro for just $2.
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I'm Mr.
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Beast and I'm doing the world's largest iPhone 15 giveaway.
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A
Click the link below to claim yours now. I mean, that's pretty real. There's no. And it was caused a big problem because a lot of people got scammed by that. So yeah, a bit of a one to worry about. So you've just got to be careful in where you put your data. People just got to be more vigilant than ever. But for us as brand owners, we just need to be thinking about how our campaigns can be used against us, if indeed they will be. Then we've got brand created AI. So this is an area that you guys might have your own views on. Feel free to share in the chat because when Will's section comes on, I'd love to hear what you think about brands using AI to create amazing content. So in December 2025, McDonald's Netherlands posted a fully AI generated Christmas ad that is viewed as creepy, soulless and lacking authenticity. The ad depicted holiday mishaps and used AI visuals. So let's just see if. Ooh, I'll show you the video in a minute. But even when the brand created AI content is a legitimate poor execution, the risk isn't only external misinformation, it can also be from generated content by AI, by a brand. And if it looks a bit naff or the idea's bad, let's see what you think of this. It's the most terrible time of the year. All the shots turned to mayhem. Even Santa no space and the tree redecorated your place. It's the most terrible time of the year. The roach turn to charcoal and the cookies burn to freaking chaos. It feels like a zoo. It's the most terrible time of the year. You get the gist. So interesting. I don't think it's. I mean, obviously it's a more recent example that. And you can't really overly tell that it's all AI. Some bits obviously you could say a cgi, but yeah, interesting. But it just didn't feel very authentic. And also I'm not sure the idea is a brilliant one. Most terrible time of the year. Now they're trying to be controversial, but it was interesting. Yeah, that was pretty derided, that campaign, but sorry if anyone was involved in it. And then we've got here. H and M announced plans for an AI generated digital twin models. So in other words, have the models having a digital twin, so using AI models to do modeling. And then there's all the arguments over ethics, replacing jobs or models because it's cheaper. Let's see what you think.
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H and M is creating digital replicas of their models. The fashion giant plans to develop AI twins of 30 models this year, offering them full ownership of their virtual counterparts. These digital avatars can take modeling jobs while the human models are elsewhere, potentially doubling their income opportunities with without additional time commitments. When one model first saw her AI twin, she described it as exciting but unsettling, a sentiment echoed across the industry as fashion grapples with AI. H&M acknowledges its approach will be controversial, but believes involving models directly in the process protects their rights and livelihoods as AI inevitably transforms the industry. The company plans to watermark all AI generated content for transparency and to gauge public reaction. Critics worry about impacts on photographers, makeup artists and stylists whose jobs could diminish if AI replaces traditional photo shoots. By merging human talent with digital innovation, H and M aims to establish ethical standards for AI and fashion while the industry navigates uncharted territory.
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A
I mean, I'm not sure what I think about that with copyright and fake people. What do you think, world? Do you think that's a good use of, like, because of the copyright infringement and like the fact people's images are being used? What do you think?
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B
Well, it's, in some respects it's progressive because they're involving the models and they're also fully disclosing the use of AI. But it is a strange, uncharted territory, isn't it? The fact that actually one model could be doing five or six jobs at the same time. And actually I think no matter how good AI is, like that McDonald's ad, there's something about it that doesn't feel quite right and it just doesn't feel, you know, it's the. What's the phrase, the Uncanny Valley effect, isn't it? It just doesn't ring quite true. So on one hand, but yeah, this
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A
is the worst AI is, the worst AI is ever going to be. That's the issue. I've got.
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Maybe one day we can deliver our webinars as AI avatars.
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Chris probably could today if we try.
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While we do the day Job in the background.
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Deep fake corporate fraud then. So ARUP was defrauded of 20 million pounds after scammer used a deep fake video call featuring realistic voices, images and misleading an employee into authorizing transfers similar to what I was doing with Will, but on a much bigger scale. So if we just click this.
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C
Just last month, a finance worker in Hong Kong got scammed into paying a whopping $25 million to scammers who used deepfake technology to successfully pose as a company executive during an entire zoom meeting. Now, Hong Kong police have yet to reveal the identity of the company or the worker who got scammed, but here's what we do know based on the reporting. The worker initially received an email from what claimed to be a UK based company's chief financial officer, the cfo. But the finance worker was skeptical because the email was super fishy. Red flags were raised after the email referenced a secret transaction that had to be carried out. But then things got even weirder. Okay, the worker was later persuaded that no, no, this actually isn't a scam at all. Because during a zoom call with the CFO and other colleagues, they knew the worker ended up getting persuaded that like, no, I'm talking to a real person. This is legit, right? And so let's move forward with this deal now. The worker was later persuaded, however, let's talk a little bit about what happened here. So here's what the Hong Kong police suspects happened. Scammers found publicly available video and audio of the impersonation targets via YouTube and then used deepfake technology to emulate their voices, to lure the victim to follow their instructions. But that's only one piece of the puzzle. So there's more. The fraud in Hong Kong almost certainly used real time deepfakes, meaning that the fake executive mirrored the scammer as they listened, talked and nodded during the meeting. According to David Maimon, a criminology professor at Georgia State University, online fraudsters have been using real time deepfakes on video calls since at least last year for smaller scale fraud, including romance scam.
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So in other words, they used instant, like now I could become that person and talk and it would be that other person on the call. Instant, real time deep fake to trick so the person could just act and then it looks like the person that they want to speak to. Amazing but scary technology. So it shows that deep fakes aren't just misinformation. They can directly cause financial loss, operational disruption to other organizations, and brand and reputation effects bleed into customer trust and internal security. So a quite worrying scenario, but you can prepare for it. But first Will's going to go on to how to prepare for it. But before Will's going to go through the polls.
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B
Yeah. So fascinating to see your responses to some of these points. I'm going to share them on the screen and then we'll have a quick chat about them. So is your crisis plan, AI and social media ready? So typically people are starting to incorporate social media into a crisis plan, which is great because, you know, a year ago people weren't even taking into consideration social media as part of a crisis plan. But I think AI needs to be a consideration there. So either it doesn't consider them or it's social only. So that's quite interesting. Who owns misinformation in your organization? Well, this actually plays into what I'm about to talk to. So marketing and comms along with everything else in an organization, typically things get delegated to marketing and comms, don't they? But actually AI as AI and misinformation does sit quite logically with marketing and comms. So what best describes your approach to misinformation? So neither proactive nor reactive, which implies that people aren't yet thinking about it, which is fine. That's why you're on this webinar and people tend to be reactive. When, you know, when it happens, you deal with it, but you're not proactively taking steps to deal with it. Again, that's fine. We're going to talk through how you can be more proactive. And it is an emerging discipline, AI driven misinformation. So it's, you know, it's, you know, don't beat yourselves up about it if you're not doing anything yet. What are people most worried about when it comes to misinformation? Search generated misinformation, brand impersonation and parody, fake reviews? Yeah, all of these are, you know, we, we have conversations with clients about these challenges frequently. And then have you suffered from some kind of misinformation issue or threat? So yes, malicious, slash coordinated, yes, but not necessarily malicious. And that, that's, that's the reality of a lot of misinformation. It's not all, you know, that Jet2, I know that was a bit of a parody thing, you know that, that wasn't necessarily driven by hackers or anything. It is just a bit of fun and something that gains traction. And often this stuff can, can be not necessarily malicious but can equally cause a lot of damage. Often it is malicious and like, you know, like the Mr. Beast example, it's about data capture or it's about, you know, hacking into people's bank accounts or whatever. But yeah, certainly interesting. So we've alarmed you with the problem and how much it's going to grow. Now we're going to talk through some of the solutions if I can stop sharing this. So this is how to be proactive and how to fight back. And essentially it's a framework. So what we're going to look at now is how you can actually adapt your crisis management plan to take into consideration AI and misinformation. And essentially this is, you know, I keep talking about this, but this is about being proactive, not reactive. And you know, if you're interested in these topics, as Chris said, we, we have a, a podcast that's really well listened to. It's the number one marketing podcast in the uk. A little plug there. But we, we've, we've tackled misinformation in various guises over the last year and there's a really great episode with Ant Cousins. I don't know if you know Ant, but he is the VP of product at Meltwater, which is a kind of AI driven social media listening tool and he specializes in AI and comms. And it's a really interesting chat. He really puts a lot of, kind of meat on the bones and highlights how this is a growing threat. And one of the key takeaways, and we're really on the same page with this is, you know, as a big brand or as a brand, just being reactive is no longer an option. You need to be very much proactive when it comes to the threat posed by misinformation. And it's almost a, it's almost an insurance policy in the way that no doubt you've got a robust crisis plan. You know, we need to also have a robust misinformation plan as well. We're going to talk through over the next few slides ways you can do that. So I found it quite interesting that 50% of you said misinformation sits with marketing. And from our experience, that's absolutely right. If you look at an organization, I mean, I'm not saying these parties aren't involved at all, but it, they see the world through systems, legal sees the world through liability. But from a marketing perspective, you know, marketing's uniquely placed in, as far as you're aware of customers and customer sentiment and content and you're aware and are able to content. And for that reason, marketing tends to own misinformation and therefore the board, the C suite will look to marketing to understand how you're going to mitigate against misinformation. So yeah, we need to be prepared and we need to build our knowledge. So it's, you know, as ever with a lot of these things, it's not necessarily rocket science, it's more about improving current processes. So I'd love to know in the chat actually how many, how many of you have got a kind of a robust crisis plan and how often you use it and refresh it. We're big advocates in regular scenario testing when it comes to a crisis plan. You know, just having a crisis plan isn't enough. You need to be constantly testing it and stress testing it and improving it. But essentially, you know, the crisis process, you've got your pre crisis phase, which arguably is the most important phase. This is all about preparation, it's all about having a robust plan, constantly updating it, scenario testing it, having the, the right protocols in place. The better your pre crisis plan, the more effective the next stage is going to be, which is the crisis response. And ideally you won't be called into action too often, but when you do get a crisis, essentially you've then got to implement the crisis plan and you've got to try and mitigate that crisis as quickly as possible. And then another really important phase of crisis management, and a lot of people forget this is the post crisis phase, which is where you critically analyze what works, what didn't work, and all of those learnings can go back into that pre crisis phase and it becomes this kind of loop of continual improvement. So we're going to dig into some of these stages and look at the role that misinformation and AI increasingly plays in each of these. So crisis response, sorry, wrong slide. Crisis response. So two things to bear in mind. First of all, we need a repeatable framework. That is, we need a robust crisis plan that can be used in the same way multiple times. Essentially the first 24 hours in terms of how you respond to a crisis are super important. So speed tends to beat perfection. By that I mean don't procrastinate endlessly over what your response is going to be, because what that will do is create s and it will create a vacuum where you get suspicion and speculation. So any kind of response is better than no response. And this kind of calm clarity tends to protect trust. Try not to sound defensive, try not to sound panicked. That kind of goes without saying. But essentially what you're looking at with this kind of crisis plan is a repeatable framework. So it Allows you to do things like pause marketing activity, which I'm going to. Come on, you know, have you got kind of a campaign running that is at odds with what's happening? You might issue a holding statement and you need to also monitor and update, you know, monitor what's going on and update the team. When you issue a holding statement, you need to be really clear so what, you know, what is false information. You need to reassure your customers, you need to update and avoid kind of legal language and corporate cliches. But essentially, you know, we talk about the golden hour or the golden, you know, the golden 24 hours. It's that first kind of 24 hours that's really, really important to get right when it comes to a crisis. I've realized this is slightly out of order, so apologies for that. I'm going to jump back to pre crisis now, which is all about the preparation part. So, and just to reiterate, the more time you spend in pre crisis, the more effective your, your response. When it actually comes to delivering your response, your crisis response is going to be. So pre crisis, we need a crisis plan. Most of you will have a crisis plan, but we need to make sure it's social media enabled, which it sounds like by the polls, most of yours are. But also we need to look at potential AI scenarios that might occur as part of this crisis plan. So Chris talked about things like fake influencers, scam promotions, CEO mimicking or deep fake voices. All of these scenarios could affect your brand. In fact, the training session we most recently did regarding misinformation, it was all about fake nutritional information on some of the products. And there's lots of misinformation from activists and from people wanting to, to damage the brand, spreading rumors that carcinogenic ingredients were included in their products, which just wasn't true. What's really important as well is things like defining governance and ownership. Everybody needs to have very, very clear roles. As with any crisis plan, you need to be really clear on who does what. This idea of testing response simulations is really important as well. So when we've agreed the different scenarios that might occur, we need to then look at how that might play out and, you know, look at who deals with what, how statements are put out, you know, what happens with social media, what happens with your website. And we also need to monitor visuals, not just text. And this comes back to the idea of being proactive. So when we spoke with Ant Cousins, his tool at Meltwater is a social listening tool, but it also monitors visuals. So it's not just about looking at how your brand's talked about, it's actually looking at how your products are being shared on image sharing sites or how your logo might be being used. And a lot of misinformation is visual in nature, not text in nature. So you really need to make sure your kind of social listening is up to scratch. And this is something I'm going to talk about later. But the way we work with influencers needs to be tightened up as well. And we need to bear in mind that influencers may inadvertently be using AI content or we might get fake influencers or whatever, as the Mr. Beast example showed. And then we need to anticipate risks. And you know this, this comes down to being a little bit creative. You can actually, ironically you can actually use AI to predict some of the AI generated misinformation risks you're likely to find. So you're going to have two types of risk, always on risks, which are things like CEO impersonation, scam promotions, fake news articles. But then you might have campaign specific risks. So you might be launching a new marketing campaign, a new product launch campaign, and there may be specific nuanced risks related to that campaign. Back to the Jet2 example, in a lot of cases it's very difficult to anticipate the risk. I think when JetU launched that campaign with the best will in the world, you would never guess that people are going to hijack it and start talking about holiday nightmares. So you can't always do this. But as far as possible possible try and anticipate different risks. And it might not be a case of canceling the campaign if you do think there's a risk. It's more about being prepared should that risk happen. It's worth here looking back to the kind of, you know, the core principles of online crisis management. These are still absolutely applicable, you know, and AI doesn't AI and misinformation doesn't fundamentally change the way you approach crisis management. But you know, certainly you need to make sure you are in line with best practice. So response obviously act quickly, focus on facts, use your own channels as well where there's less risk for you losing control of the message. So that is your website or whatever that may be, messaging. Of course you're going to have pre approved statements and those pre approved statements are going to take into consideration misinformation as well communication. You need to make sure your, your internal comms is up to scratch. You also need to make sure your internal teams are aware AI misinformation, they know how to spot a fake. They know how the social listening tools work. They know they, you know, they know what they're doing in the context of misinformation. So nothing is a surprise to them. And then consistency as ever. So regular updates, monitoring sentiment, et cetera, et cetera. So this remains really, really important. We're going to talk about influencers in a second, which are really important. But I guess by way of conclusion, crisis, quick tips. And again, back to what Ant said. We need to be proactive, so identify issues early and you can do that through training, through skills and development, through using the right tools. Proactive social listening. Taking into consideration audio, video, visuals as well as text only. Be ready to secure your social media accounts if you need to, of course, pause, you know, pause scheduled posts or campaigns, be great at internal comms and make sure everybody knows everybody's on the same page. Know when to engage and when not to. And that's one of the kind of the golden rules of dealing with a crisis in social media. If you're getting 10,000 complaints about something, it's not possible to necessarily respond to all 10,000. Pick out the top themes and respond and pin those to the top of the profile, whatever it may be, and go public quickly if required. Again, silence equals speculation and it creates a vacuum. So even if the statement is we're looking into it, issue a statement. So influences and misinformation and these do pose a unique set of risks. And this really needs to be a consideration. The way we work with influencers and the way we, we risk, assess working with influencers. And I suppose the, the risk of influencers is particularly if you're working with kind of bigger ticket influencers. They are by their nature in general trustworthy consumer. You know, all sorts of research shows that consumers trust the views of influencers above traditional media channels. They have the potential for messaging or content to spread extremely fast by the social media algorithms. They can often kind of blend into authentic conversation. It's not always immediately obvious if they're an influencer. And the biggest challenge is that influencers are firmly on the agenda and on the radar of the mainstream press. So if an influencer does something untoward or we face a fake influencer, the chances are it's going to be newsworthy. And what you get is this kind of cycle where you might work with an influencer and something might happen that's bad or some misinformation might get spread. They've obviously got a huge community around them. Typically the media are one of those. And the bigger their audience, the more newsworthy they're deemed. You might then get a controversy or some sort of complaint about their content. And that in turn might create regulatory risk. And you can see how it can quite quickly spiral. As soon as the mainstream media who are already aware of these images, influencers get hold of it, you're in trouble. So there are ways you can kind of mitigate against this. Now, what we're talking about when it comes to the types of risks, it can be anything really, but the types of things we're seeing the most of cloned influencer accounts. So typically an influencer will get, you know, somebody will set up and grow a fake influencer account. So in some cases that could mean that influencer who's a bot may get in touch with you, you might gift them product, you might even form a brand partnership with them and it's not even them. Or a well known influencer might start talking about an issue or a topic related to your brand that simply isn't true. Equally, there's an emergence of fake talent agents who, who essentially are on the scam, on the take and they will work with, apparently work with influencers, but it's not really them. Deep fake ads promoting scams. Again, that's down to the Mr. Beast example. Typically that comes down to illegal data capture and also, you know, see CEO impersonations and things like that. I don't know if anyone saw the McDonald's CEO eating the burger, which we all watched on Monday as part of, as part of a team meeting that was, that was real, I believe. But you know that quite easily. He actually looked like a AI created bot. Didn't. Either way, he was eating the burger. So. But yeah, there's a lot of risk out there from influencers and, and the issue is even if you're not directly targeted, consumers may associate the scam with your brand. So if you've got a fake influencer talking about the carcinogenic properties of your burgers or whatever it might be, even if it's not true, it's going to create you issues and it's going to create you damage. So what can we do? If anyone works with influencers, no doubt you will do a due diligence process before you actually work with them. And that will involve probably chatting with them, looking at how engaged their community is looking at their content. We just need to kind of expand that when we do our due diligence to make sure, I suppose, you know, one of the main risks of working with a legitimate influencer Is do they ever use AI as part of their content? If they do use AI, do they disclose it? You know, what's their, have they got an ethical approach to using AI? You know, the worst thing would be for an influencer to trial your product, but it's, it's them using the products but created by AI which immediately undermines them and it undermines your brand. We need to make sure as part of influencer contract, we've got elements of contractual safeguards. So, you know, working with an influencer, typically we would lay out a really detailed SLA in terms of what we want from them. So as part of that, we now say we don't want any undisclosed AI generated content in the context of our product or our brand. Pre approval clauses, claims verifications, that kind of thing need to be taken into consideration. And as ever with influencers, risk score the influencer based on what you find out about them. So if they do use lots of AI content, but they've promised not to, you might be okay, but risk score them and make decisions based on that. But as with your crisis plan, when you're vetting influencers, bear in mind AI and misinformation risks. Now again, we need to be proactive when it comes to how influencers might be talking about our product or might be sharing misinformation. Again, social listening is really important. A lot of social listening tools now are AI powered so they can identify AI content, so they can use AI tools to kind of supercharge your listening and essentially gives you much greater visibility of how your brand or your category is being talked about. Things like keyword and image alerts can help reverse image or video search, again, product and use logos, etc. You can look at how they're being talked about. And essentially over time it's worth building a bit of a dashboard where you can, this can be a way to kind of expand your existing social listening dashboard if you already do that. And also monitoring cloned accounts, if you identify problematic accounts that are brand parodies or whatever it may be, monitor them and keep a close eye on them. So post crisis and long term resilience. This is the kind of concluding section I mentioned. Again, you know, what you do after a crisis is every bit as important as how well you prepare for it. And the more you can kind of analyze how an issue or a crisis was handled, that allows you to constantly improve. And this is all about kind of continual improvement. So you know, post crisis or post issue, how effective was your response? You know, which channels performed best you know, which were the most positive, neutral or negative channels? Which channels were you able to kind of shut the issue down on? Quickest reach an impact of the issue. That's your key metric for how big or how small something was. Again, you can use social listening to track sentiment of an issue over time. So how long was it negative for? How long did it take for your brand sentiment to return to normal and start to update any, you know, any gaps where you lack governance or you lack clarity? And this is really important because the more you do this, the better you will get, essentially. And ultimately you're going to get better. You know, the more you analyze it, your responses are going to be much, much more effective. And the more you incorporate misinformation and AI and whatever else is around the corner, the more effective your crisis plan is going to be. So our view as an agency, and this isn't just kind of predictions and this isn't just anecdotal feedback, but the volume of conversations we're having with global brands about AI misinformation is growing. It's very much moved perhaps a year or two ago, from something that was quite hypothetical to a very real threat. It's not always going to be malicious. Sometimes it may be somebody creating content just for fun that spirals out of control. But the reality is it's. It's a risk and it's only going to become a bigger risk as AI technology grows. It's operational, reputational, financial and cultural. And essentially the brands that don't take this into consideration are going to be the ones most, most at risk. So be proactive, look at your crisis plan, take it into consideration, educate yourselves and educate your teams. So we do have a product. This is the sales bit at the end, but if you're interested in some of these topics, we can help you. You know, we can help you get AI ready, essentially. So no doubt you'll have a crisis plan, but a lot of the work we're doing at the moment is in enhancing and developing crisis plans with AI misinformation clauses. And essentially it's an insurance policy, if you like, against the threat posed by AI and misinformation. Obviously, it's bespoke to your business and sector and essentially it's an updated crisis plan with a really detailed AI risk assessment. So what are the risks your particular brand are likely to face? What are some example scenarios? We would then enhance your response protocols. We would develop a live monitoring toolkit, and that's bedded in via scenario testing, which essentially is posing these three or four credible misinformation AI scenarios that you're likely to face and it's putting your crisis plan up. So if you want to be ready for risk posed by misinformation, do give us a shout and we can tell you more about it. And hopefully we haven't scared you too much, but we wanted to end with a positive. But thank you very much for that. Hope you found that interesting. There's been some great conversations in the chat. Thank you for filling in the polls. That's been insightful. We'll send this through as Chris said. And we do have a whole program of events. The next one's on influencers. So if you want to look at our, our on demand events, we've covered all sorts of topics in the past or register for our future events. Have a look there, there's our contact details and also I would urge you to look at our podcast as well. As I said, we've covered AI, we've covered misinformation and all sorts of other topics in, in all sorts of detail. So lots of interesting content.
- [55:38]
A
Number one marketing podcast in the uk, William, as of December.
- [55:42]
B
Very good. What number are we top? Is it top? Number three business podcast in the uk.
- [55:48]
A
We were just next to Stephen Bartlett the other day at number two, but we're number four at the moment. So if you look at that, you can see we're number four, Embracing Marketing Mistakes. I didn't rehearse that.
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B
Yeah, thank you very much for joining us today. Hope you found that useful. Yeah, I can see the chat's going mad, which is what we like. And yeah, you'll get copies of that and any questions in the meantime, get in touch.
- [56:24]
A
Thanks for listening to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. You've reached the end of the podcast. Hooray. What can you possibly do to help Chris and will the providers of this show? Well, what you can help us by doing is just please give us some feedback. Positive, negative, constructive. Well, hopefully not negative. But if you could give us a review somewhere, five star review, preferably wherever you get your podcast, it will really help for people to find the show because there's loads of other people out there that we'd love to hear about it and the guests that come on here, we want to give them as much visibility as possible. So yeah, I want to just thank you personally for listening to the show. I really appreciate it because it's a bit weird. We record it in Leeds and wherever you are around the world, from Peru to Estonia to Russia to Africa, I want to thank all of you for listening. Really appreciate it. So, yeah, if you, if you like the show, please, please give us a review because it means a lot. So thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of your week. See you next week.