How the Blackbird.AI Platform Addresses Narrative Attacks in the Advertising Industry

The advertising industry has long known that security issues can create great challenges for their sector. Botnets and other attacks, for example, undermine the buyers’ confidence in the industry by calling into question the metrics on which fees are based. Making matters worse, a new threat to this industry has emerged based on an attack on the reputation and narrative associated with advertising companies, and new security methods are needed.

Narrative attacks on advertising industry groups involve an adversary using either misinformation, which is factually incorrect data, or disinformation, which is using bad data to deliberately target an individual or group. When this bad information is used against an advertising agency or other team, usually on social media, reputational challenges can damage the organization.

Learn More: Narrative Attacks: The New Cybersecurity Threat

Narrative Attacks on Advertising Organizations

The type of narrative attacks one would expect to see in advertising would likely target some target agency’s reputation and integrity. Anyone in the industry will understand that advertising, even in the era of online ads, still operates based on trust between the client and the agency. So, fake stories about mishandling customer accounts, bad actions by agency staff, and other misinformation could seriously harm business. With online ads, a key problem that has emerged involves using fake bots that drive up advertising bills. Anyone who has ever purchased online advertising knows the discomfort of paying bills based on clicks or eyeballs and being unable to connect that with sales. Narrative attacks that falsely suggest that bots are playing a greater role than is accurate would likely hurt business for any player in the online advertising space.

It is worth mentioning that many advertising industry participants work adjacently with marketing and public relations (PR) firms. These types of businesses are also highly susceptible to narrative attacks, especially PR firms since they operate almost entirely on a relationship basis. If a PR firm has its reputation called into question due to a narrative attack, then the impact could be disastrous for business.

Learn More: Business Case: Why Cybersecurity Leaders and CISOs Need Narrative Risk Intelligence

Addressing Narrative Attacks to Advertising with Blackbird.AI

Blackbird.AI provides just the type of narrative attack visibility, insight, and guidance necessary for firms in this sector, including advertising, marketing, and PR firms, to take positive steps to help reduce the risk of such incidents. Without knowing that such narratives are being levied against a targeted firm, a false narrative could easily gain momentum and be particularly tough to handle.

As a result, we recommend that firms in this sector take steps to work with Blackbird.AI to understand how the platform can be deployed to reduce risk. Engaging with a commercial vendor such as Blackbird.AI will produce an immediate return on investment for this sector because (unfortunately) narrative attacks here will be particularly troublesome. As such, we expect to see them increase in the coming years.

To learn more about how Blackbird.AI can help you in these situations, book a demo.