Seekr
Senior Product Designer
Align
Brand safety scoring for podcast advertising
Role
Senior Product Designer
Team
ML dev team, Researcher, VP of Product Management
Partners
Oxford Road
Context
A VP walked up to me with a sketch and an idea. Three weeks later we had a prototype in front of media planners. Five months later we shipped a patented AI product to thousands of users — and along the way, our design research changed how the AI model itself worked.
Scanning episode
PROFANITY12:30
Political29:38
12:3012:4813:0113:3514:09
Listening/Reading
Align is reading the episode end-to-end. No brand-safety signal has surfaced yet — the timeline above fills in as each segment is cleared.
Auto-playing the read — watch the timeline resolve
The Challenge
Brands need to know the podcasts they advertise on are safe to their level of comfort. Seekr's AI scores content across 11 GARM risk categories and our proprietary Civility Score, but raw AI scores don't mean anything to a brand manager scanning 500 podcasts.
AI scores alone don't build trust.
A firearms score that's acceptable for one advertiser is a dealbreaker for another. I partnered with our researcher Nora to map brand-type thresholds and design a journey that guided users to the right context.
3 levels of context
Brands can drill from high-level podcast scores down to the exact audio moment that triggered a flag. Transparency is core to the product.
Podcast Overview
Browse all podcasts with aggregate scores. GARM risk levels and Civility Scores visible at a glance.
Episode Breakdown
See every episode scored individually. Identify which episodes carry the most risk and why.
Flagged Moment
Jump to the exact part of the episode that triggered a score. Audio player anchored to risk context.
Finding the threshold
The hardest part wasn't visualizing scores, it was understanding what those scores meant to different brands at each level of exploration.
At the highest level, viewing all shows, our patented Civility Score would display our rating, which we wanted to gain credibility and market our unique value. Below, we showed GARM categories that the podcasts has consistently exhibited for the past 3 months.
