Media Intelligence in Risk Analysis

Risk analysis is a fundamental aspect of any business strategy.

The goal is to help organizations uncover and examine any risks that may be a factor to the success of a business. It includes financial risk relating to market, credit, and liquidity, and also non-financial risks, categorized by the second Basel Accord as: 

1. Internal Fraud
2. External Fraud
3. Employment Practices and Workplace Safety
4. Clients, Products, and Business Practice
5. Damage to Physical Assets
6. Business Disruption and Systems Failures
7. Execution, Delivery, and Process Management

Further risks, as highlighted by Deloitte, include cyber, conduct, model, compliance, strategic, and thirdparty risk.

Combined, these factors present a real threat to business success.

What are the challenges associated with media intelligence?

The main challenge is the sheer and ever-expanding volume of content being uploaded to the web each and every day. 

Having timely access to this data, while ensuring its accuracy, authority and relevance to your business, can be a laborious process.

What’s required is a solution that allows for super-specific and flexible search options, supercharging and streamlining the discovery of highly relevant content, as it’s published.

The ability to aggregate, understand and deliver content analysis at scale gives businesses the ability to unearth key insights and trends, highlighting issues that could cause problems for their operations.

Accuracy and timeliness of information are crucial aspects of this process. Our News API offers both, to help you keep your finger on the pulse and stay aware of important developments as they happen.

Here are four ways Aylien is used in a Risk Analysis context.

1. Monitoring public opinion and identifying threats

Public opinion towards an organization or its employees, products or brands can often be the making (or breaking) of them.

Reputations can deteriorate over time, so identifying such trends before they become a serious issue can save a business time, money and frustration.

To achieve this, the continuous monitoring of specific media searches is required. Our News API makes this a lot easier than traditional Google searches or custom-built solutions. When we looked at Entities v Keywords, we used Pandora as an example of a difficult boolean query made simple in our API.

Compare the long list of parameters on the left, with the simply, easy to understand single search criteria on the right: 

The result is clear, accurate searches of a well-defined entity, avoiding the hassle and complexity of wider, entity-agnostic queries.

Sentiment Polarity

Finding all the news about your target entity is only the first step. To fully understand potential risks or reputational damage, the sentiment of the news also needs to be known.

When we investigated Brexit news coverage, we highlighted the changes in sentiment over time. Our News API has the ability to track any entity over time in a similar way to the below findings:

It’s clear that Brexit was viewed very differently across the countries included. Such analysis could be especially useful for predicting reactions to new product releases or highlighting previously unknown cultural differences or attitudes across the world.

2. Monitoring competitor and industry activity

Monitoring and analyzing competitor activity can equip you with a wealth of information resulting in a competitive advantage in your quest for market dominance.

Naturally, competitor activity generates a potential threat to the success of your organization. Just look at Apple and Samsung, for example, where it seems that each action either company takes is carefully scrutinized, analyzed and compared to the other.

Samsung were certainly quick to react to Apple’s ‘bendy’ iPhone 6!

While it was hard to miss stories about Bendgate in the news, not all stories receive such mainstream attention and could easily be missed if you’re not looking at the relevant channels.

By monitoring for mentions of specific organizations, brands, products, people and so on, you can be alerted as soon as matching article is published. Not only does this make it easy to keep track of your direct competition, it can also help you keep abreast of general industry goings-on and any murmurs of potential new competitors or industry concerns.

3. Crisis management

With so many factors and variables at play and infinite external influences, no industry is immune to a potential crisis. 

Let’s take a look at one industry in particular that has been coming under recent scrutiny for including unsustainable or environmentally-unfriendly ingredients in many of its products - the cosmetics industry.

One such ingredient is palm oil, a substance that has been linked to major issues such as deforestation, habitat degradation, climate change and animal cruelty in the countries where it is produced. As a cosmetics manufacturer who uses palm oil, as many do, the intensifying spotlight on this substance is bound to be of considerable concern.

By monitoring mentions of palm oil in the news, these manufacturers can keep up to date with the latest developments, as they happen, putting them in a strong position to react as soon as required.

Below is one such example of a story that was returned while monitoring mentions of ‘Palm Oil’ in African media;

Further analysis can show trends in the likes of social media shares or article length breakdown, either of which could signify a growing emphasis on Palm Oil among the public and media.

4. Trend analysis

With access to a world of news content and intelligent insights comes the opportunity for countless analyses and comparisons of trends. As an example, let’s search by category to see if there any noticeable differences or trends emerging from news stories in two separate countries.

The category we’ll look at is Electric Cars and the two source countries being analyzed are the UK and Australia. Below we have visual representations of the sentiment levels returned for each search, from the past 30 days.

As you can see, the vast majority of stories have been written in a neutral manner. What we’re interested in, however, is the significant difference in the levels of negative sentiment between the two countries around our chosen category.

Our results show that the Australian media are perhaps not too keen on the idea of Electric Cars, or perhaps there has been some negative publicity around the topic in recent times. On further inspection, we found that the uptake of electric cars has been extremely low in Australia compared to other countries, with manufacturers citing a lack of government assistance for this.

While this may seem like a straightforward comparison, when applied at scale it is this level of analysis that enables risk assessors to spot trends and ultimately improve their decision-making process. By analyzing multiple metrics side by side, interesting trends can emerge. Looking at the comparison below, again between the UK and Australia, it is evident that even in the past two months, the volume of stories relating to electric cars is increasing in Australia, but general interest still lags considerably behind the UK.

Business owners and project managers understand who and where potential threats can come from, and therefore have a very defined variety of entities and elements that need to be monitored. Projects that are based in, or focused on, different geographic locations will often pose their own unique threats and challenges. A multi-region project, for example, will require multiple risk assessments as part of the overall risk analysis process.

Conclusion

With each project comes a new set of challenges and potential threats. The more an organization can learn about these threats the greater chance they have of reducing the level of risk involved in making certain decisions or strategic moves. Media monitoring provides risk assessors with a wealth of publicly available information, from which intelligent insights, trends and analyses can be drawn.

However specific or niche your own search requirements are, with 24/7 worldwide news monitoring backed up by cutting edge Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technology, our News API can help you with your risk analysis needs.

Ready to get started? Try the News API free for 14 days and with our Getting Started with the News API guides below, you’ll be up and running in no time.

Getting Started with the News API Part 1: Search

Getting Started with the News API Part 2: Insights