Tyson Foods Demonstrates Commitment to Credible Journalism with Mindshare and SocialContext Impact Index

Impact Index to Drive Socially Responsible Brand Content and Media Investments

SPRINGDALE, Ark., Aug. 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN) is demonstrating its commitment to credible and socially responsible journalism in its advertising on websites and media by conducting a social context Impact Index in partnership with Mindshare, the global media services company, and socialcontext.ai, a contextual intelligence startup supported by the University of Colorado Boulder.  

The Impact Index is an analytics tool that looks at the social impact of editorial content on minority communities. The custom algorithms powering the Index are trained, validated, and regularly audited by experts to identify detrimental or hateful content towards minority groups and communities. Media planners can then leverage this page-level data to quantify the impact their investments have on different communities and inform and optimize a brand's paid media spend accordingly.

"Tyson Foods has one of the most diverse workforces, and we're proud to advance diversity, equity and inclusion by committing to actions like the Impact Index," said Paul Davis, vice president and chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer for Tyson Foods. "The Impact Index will ensure our actions in brand responsibility ladder up to our core values as a company and individuals." 

As a first mover for the Impact Index, Tyson Foods is working with Mindshare and socialcontext.ai to analyze content around minority communities and drive more inclusive content. The company will continue to advance diversity, equity and inclusion by committing to work towards increasing diverse supplier spending, conducting education, training, and developing innovative programs through strategic partnerships to increase consumer awareness.

"Brands and ad placements have an impact on consumers, be it consciously or subconsciously," says Jared Greene, director of Invention+ at Mindshare, who co-led the launch of the Impact Index. "A tool like the Impact Index is a positive step in addressing the role human well-being plays in creating our media plans, and our ambition to make media more intentional and equitable for all consumers."

The Impact Index is the most recent example of Mindshare's parent company, GroupM, and Tyson Foods' collaborative efforts to advance diversity in paid media. In 2021, GroupM launched the "Responsible Investment" framework which includes the Media Inclusion Initiative to support and grow diverse media companies and creators. Tyson Foods has pledged to increase their investment in minority-owned media and minority voices. As part of that, several Tyson Foods brands have run campaigns through Mindshare's Black Community private marketplace, which drives media dollars to Black journalists and content creators across the U.S. The agency's private marketplace series is part of Mindshare's larger "Good Growth" vision and strategy—business growth that is enduring and sustainable, while also helping to shape society and the world for the better.  

"The Media Inclusion Initiative strongly aligns with our efforts to invest and support supplier diversity.  It establishes an actionable pathway to reach more underrepresented communities, and drive positive cultural change," said Davis.

The Impact Index begins with a design brief development process, and then media planners input all the elements of a brand's current media plan including creative examples. Next, the Index monitors, analyzes, and annotates publishers' content on a four-stage scale of impact from positive to toxic. Once the analysis is completed, Mindshare works with its clients to make strategic decisions on their media investments. Using its proprietary tool, Synapse, the agency can also forecast potential media spending and allocations' impact on projected business objectives. These inputs enable marketers to create inclusive, intentional media plans supporting their businesses and communities.

"Some of the most positive, constructive journalism today uses words and phrases that have been defined as sensitive by brand suitability solutions," says Chris Vargo, co-founder and CEO of socialcontext.ai. "We've built a system that understands the true social context of news content. This allows Mindshare and their clients to quantify the human impact of their investments, fund quality news and mitigate the unintended consequences of well-intentioned but overbroad brand suitability tools."

About Tyson Foods 
Tyson Foods (NYSE: TSN) is one of the world's largest food companies and a recognized leader in protein. Founded in 1935 by John W. Tyson and grown under four generations of family leadership, the Company has a broad portfolio of products and brands like Tyson®, Jimmy Dean®, Hillshire Farm®, Ball Park®, Wright®, Aidells®, ibp® and State Fair®. Tyson Foods innovates continually to make protein more sustainable, tailor food for everywhere it's available and raise the world's expectations for how much good food can do. Headquartered in Springdale, Arkansas, the Company had approximately 137,000 team members at October 2, 2021. Through its Core Values, Tyson Foods strives to operate with integrity, create value for its shareholders, customers, communities and team members and serve as a steward of the animals, land and environment entrusted to it. Visit www.tysonfoods.com.

About Mindshare
Mindshare is a media services company that accelerates Good Growth for its clients in the age of transformation. Good Growth is business growth that is enduring and sustainable whilst also helping to shape society and the world for the better. We accelerate it for our clients by using media as a multiplier to drive sales and maximize marketing investments. We use Precisely Human Intelligence that combines data science and behavioral science to understand consumers and their motivations better and we act on that intelligence by planning media with intention to connect brands with consumers around their shared values. We were the first purpose-built company created by WPP and today our 10,000 people operate in 116 offices in 86 countries, helping to drive Good Growth for our clients, our people, the industry and the world.

www.mindshareworld.com
Instagram and Twitter: @mindshare_usa 
Facebook: facebook.com/mindshareusa 
LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/company/mindshare

About socialcontext.ai
Socialcontext.ai detects diversity, equity and inclusion ad opportunities on news content. Our patent-pending deep learning approach is built by journalism, advertising and data science professors at the University of Colorado Boulder. We positively target news articles with unrivaled precision and safety. Socialcontext.ai allows advertisers to meet their DEI goals by enabling them to invest in ads on news content that matches their core values. Each algorithm socialcontext.ai builds is designed to identify only quality, credible journalism that brings awareness to positive social change.

Socialcontext.ai expands the programmatic reach of advertisers and recovers ~20% of impressions blocked due to overbroad brand safety. Using deep learning, each algorithm is built on data analyzed by our experts. Each socialcontext.ai segment is the product of tens of thousands of human annotations and is only released when its classification performance metrics reach academic peer-review standards. The result is article-level news intelligence with accuracy, precision and recall unmatched by current sentiment and entity recognition approaches.

Our AI is ethically reviewed by outside academics. We take transparency seriously and allow advertisers to see "under the hood" to understand exactly what is inside each segment we build

https://socialcontext.ai/
Instagram and Twitter: @socialcontextai 
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/socialcontext

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SOURCE Mindshare