Guest Pat LaCroix discusses his career in advertising and the transition to brand-side roles with CVS Health and Bose. Today, Pat is the EVP of Strategic Partnerships at Seekr Technologies, an AI company that offers content evaluation solutions. Pat discusses how Seekr’s AI platform analyzes brand safety and suitability for advertisers and, in this election year, explains Seekr’s unique ‘civility’ score. Pat provides unique insights at the intersection of AI and marketing.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Pat LaCroix: We believe artificial intelligence is only as good as the human intelligence that’s informing it. And we believe having transparency and explainability and responsibility tied to how AI is being developed, the inputs and the outputs you get from AI, that’s a key benefit and, for us, a key differentiator.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Despite the fact that podcasts capture an increasingly significant share of people’s daily media consumption, they attract a disproportionately low share of advertising dollars, by some estimates just one-fifth of their potential based on current audience sizes. A key reason that podcasts and, indeed, other types of media are underexploited by advertisers is concern about brand safety Traditional methods of filtering content rely on keywords Still, as we’ve discussed previously on IN CLEAR FOCUS these are pretty blunt instruments that often exclude relevant and safe environments which in turn demonetizes publishers However, artificial intelligence-based tech is starting to enable scalable solutions that can provide much more nuanced content analysis. To learn how one company is using AI to ease advertisers’ concerns and help increase publishers’ monetization, our guest today has a unique vantage point. For over two decades, Pat LaCroix has led agency and brand side functions for venerable organizations such as Bose, CVS Health, MediaHub, and Havas, including B2C and B2B marketing and brand strategy, media, sports marketing, and digital innovation. Pat has been recognized as one of the 40 under 40 by Sports Business Journal, has been a judge for the Clio Sports Awards and the FIs, and serves on the board of directors at the Ad Club. Pat is currently spearheading strategic partnerships at Seekr Technologies, a privately held artificial intelligence company that delivers a complete end-to-end AI and data platform with comprehensive content scoring capabilities and a tool set to build principle-aligned language models. To discuss Seekr’s AI-powered platform and his professional career trajectory, I’m delighted that Pat is joining us today from Boston, Massachusetts. Pat, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Adrian Tennant:  Great to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Pat LaCroix: You’ve held a number of senior leadership roles in marketing. Were you always interested in pursuing marketing or advertising as a career?

Pat LaCroix: I would say the short answer that would be no. As a child, I was always, and still to this day, I’ve been insatiably fascinated by, interested, just generally knowledgeable about media. A lot of my friends and family will call that my encyclopedic knowledge of useless information. But just from a very young age, going back to, I don’t want to date myself, the mid-1980s, Just understanding and following who was on TV what time tv shows were things that way so I always had an insatiable curiosity and media. It wasn’t until I was in college focusing on communications I was minoring in journalism and thinking about becoming. order in some way, but then realizing the idea of staying up all night chasing down a story, cold calling people, was not necessarily my calling. It was then that I started to think more about communications and media and the intersection thereof and pop culture. And that’s how I found my way into advertising in college. I had some wonderful professors and coursework at Marist College that got me interested in it. I think the proximity in New York City didn’t hurt. Got to work on some programs and some projects with the AAF, for example, that kind of gave me a taste of how things work. And that set me off on my way into advertising.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you started your professional career working at Catalyst, a business-to-business agency. Now, you note on your LinkedIn profile that it really shaped your philosophy. How so?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah, I did. I would imagine I would think many people in their first or early jobs that has an indelible mark on the rest of their career. For me, not even knowing what business-to-business advertising or marketing was at that point, I had the great fortune of having a wonderful mentor who was the president and then owner of the agency, which was a very small agency. His name’s Chuck Weintraub – shout out to Chuck Weintraub, who now is now gleefully retired in Boulder, Colorado, rooting on his beloved CU Buffs. But he was in Stanford, Connecticut, a small agency, business-to-business, working on a lot of industrial building products and brands and things like that. But what I learned then was just because you did the job you were given, doesn’t necessarily mean you were actually doing the job the right way. And really, it was impressed upon me, the importance of thinking big picture, whole picture, understanding how everything you do, whether you are working on a small part of the project, or working in the big part of the company, like it all has an impact that goes beyond just the actual to do or tasks that you’re doing to think about like, “Okay, if I do this, then what will happen?” – the consequences of things, the big pictures of things. I just got a wonderful appreciation at a young age for two things. Like I said, one, understanding the big picture impact of what we do beyond just our actual day-to-day tasks, and then also the importance of mentorship. And I was very fortunate to have a great mentor in Chuck at that very early stage of my career and definitely learned, you know, during those car rides, those conversations, those kind of open communications that you can have with one another are really pressing in terms of forming opinion, point of view, expertise. It’s those more informal, casual opportunities to really connect, share, and gain knowledge from one another that just goes so far.

Adrian Tennant: That’s great advice. Well, after Catalyst, you worked as a Media Director at Davis Advertising and then joined Havas, becoming a Vice President and Account Media Director. Now, after seven years at Havas, you took the position of VP, Group Media Director at Media Hub Worldwide. Now, Pat, thinking about all the brands you worked with at those agencies, what were some of the most notable projects you worked on or maybe ones you’re proudest of?

Pat LaCroix: Sure. Well, just on a personal level, spending the first few years of my career, four years at small agencies, Catalyst and then Davis, and then going into a much larger agency, which is now Havas, you know, at the time it was Arnold and MPG, but the biggest agency in Boston, just kind of being thrown into the deep end at that point, not working in a big company, not working on big brands, and not having any of the formal training of someone else who might have spent four years at the larger agency. it was a great learning curve, and I definitely was thrown into the deep end in terms of terminologies and frameworks and I had no familiarity with I was really proud in hindsight really proud of how I handled myself, which was just basically to put the extra time and really understand what this all meant and I think in a way that helped springboard my career because I did have that motivation to really learn and do and figure out, probably driven by some insecurity, because I was coming in without the formal training that maybe other folks who had four or five years experience in the big agency had. In terms of notable pieces of business or projects to get to work on, I would call out a few. First, I had Havas. I had a chance to work on Goodyear tires for probably five years, which in agency life is like dog years, right? Probably 35 years. Goodyear, right? It is a well-known, high-awareness brand. Been around for a long time. Most people probably know the Goodyear blimp. Tires is a very low-interest category. The purchase cycle is infrequent. You only think about your tires when there’s a problem and kind of safety is at risk. So, a couple of things there. One, from a kind of marketing theory and strategy standpoint, the idea of how to effectively market tires in a very low-interest category, infrequent purchase cycle, I really got some wonderful training in terms of how to think about recency theory and point out the receptivity and things like triggers in terms of weather or travel and the things that make you know the consumer think about your product and when they might be in market when those highest points of consideration are. Also, we did a ton of innovative media thinking, particularly around the blimp, because the idea – like, I mean, this is a low-interest category, but we still need to maintain a high level of awareness. And this is back 2005 to 2010. So, TV was still quite linear, but DVRs were all the rage. And the idea was how do we become DVR-proof to stay top of mind? And we really, I think, used the blimp as a key media strategy, as a way to like wherever we can partner with networks on sports programming and use the blimp and goes, you know, “Aerial coverage brought to you by Goodyear, who wants you to get there on triple straight tires.” That was a way to really, you know, we’re providing an asset to the media partners there in terms of finding the aerial coverage and that we were able to get the consistent frequency of messaging in a very highly engaged DVR-proof environment, which was live sports. So really proud of the work we did there and still see Goodyear, which I believe still works with Havas, to leverage and deploy a very similar strategy some twelve, fifteen years later. At MediaHub that was a great opportunity to work for another Boston-based agency but one that took a very different approach in terms of challenger brand thinking and really creative media. You know, media planning is always a balance of art and science, and we certainly paid attention to the science and the data of media at MediaHub, but really, how to use that in a way to think more artistically and creatively and have challenge or disruptive ideas be a priority of how we went to market on behalf of our brand. So I was fortunate to lead and drive at the time the agency’s first entertainment category victory, which was National Geographic Channel. They’ve gone to take on a slew of entertainment and kind of tune-in brands on their roster, but that was the first. And that was really, you know, thinking in terms of entertainment marketing and how do you kind of build buzz and build a crescendo around a premiere and think about tune-in numbers and kind of the science that goes into how to get people thinking about, “Okay, I need to turn on this show at this time,” around big topics like, you know, Doomsday Preppers and Wicked Tuna and these very interesting and different themes and categories. It just really opened up my mind to like how to think as a creative marketer and a creative media planner, like the big impact that could make.

Adrian Tennant: Well, looking at your career trajectory, there’s a bit of a zag in 2013 because you went client-side, joining CVS Health as a Senior Advisor in marketing. Pat, can you tell us about your role there?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah. So that I think, like many people, after some time on the agency side, I definitely wanted to kind of see how the other side lived and get an understanding of what it was like to be the client. And CVS afforded me that opportunity. And I quickly realized that for those who have only been on the agency side, being the quote-unquote client and working brand side certainly has its benefits, but it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. You’re not just sitting there all day, just making decisions and giving approvals and leaving it at that. It actually provides many more kind of internal pressures. You get much, much more closer to the business. There’s a whole host of stakeholders internally that you have to understand and manage. The notion of alignment and working cross-functionally are skill sets and exercises that I don’t think folks just only on the agency side of their career could really understand. So I definitely got a healthy dose of that and understand how important it was to manage stakeholders, work across different functions, and tie everything back to business outcomes and business results. That was really prescient learning for me. A big takeaway I had was seeing how profit and purpose can go hand in hand. So, you know, we were able to, at the time I was at CVS was when the company was really pivoting and focusing on really becoming a healthcare-first brand and making a lot of intelligence investments and acquisitions to that end. And as part of that, the idea to take tobacco out of the stores and do that in a way that was the right thing to do and was really helping CVS fulfill its purpose to put people on a path to better health. But on the other hand, really how it opened up kind of business opportunities going forward as they really focus, had a laser focus on becoming a healthcare company. How that decision what did sacrifice near-term, short-term revenue, it was a hit, you know; really kind of opened things up for the company to be successful in the long term, so there’s a bit of understanding how purpose and profit can go hand in hand, how doing good can lead to good business and how sometimes you have to make a short term sacrifice to enable some long term gains.

Adrian Tennant: After CVS Health, you remained client-side, joining Bose Corporation as Head of North American Media, working your way up to the post of Head of Global Marketing and Partnerships. Now, you were at Bose for eight years, so Pat, how did your responsibilities evolve over that period?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah, I mean, Bose was a wonderful experience, wonderful company, great brand, great people, truly remarkable, iconic, and I would say very unique company for its time. It’s still, to this day, a founder-driven organization. I joined shortly after Dr. Bose, the founder of Bose, passed on. I definitely left an indelible mark on the company and still has to this day. I mean, the commitment to providing superior audio, superior sound listening experiences, I mean the passion and the commitment within the organization to do that through superior engineering it’s infectious for me I joined is that leading media and at a time when the brand was starting to go through some transformation and I take great pride in the role I played in some of that transformation, but, you know, traditionally very much focused on an older audience that had grown with those, but my responsibility just expanded over time. As we started into some bigger brand arenas, really focusing on positioning the brand to a wider audience, a younger audience in many ways, we started to invest more into sports, music, and entertainment. And then, with that, I was able to take on more roles around that. managing the brand overall, leveraging and managing our sponsorships, particularly in the world of sports. The NFL sponsorship was a big part of what we were doing at the time. And I was given that task and assignment to leave that significantly visible property and investment we were making on behalf of Bose and also got to expand into global. So really seeing and understanding kind of how different parts of the world, different countries, different regions, the nuance that goes into it and how to kind of understand internally how to manage folks who work and live in different parts of the world and some of those customs and habits that they have. And then also from a consumer standpoint, people buy products and consume media and interact with media in many different ways, depending on what part of the world they live in. So really having a sharp eye and ear for stakeholders internally in terms of the associates, police that was overseeing, and then also the customers and consumers we were trying to serve.

Adrian Tennant: Bringing us bang up to date, you’re now the EVP of Strategic Partnerships at Seekr Technologies. Pat, can you explain briefly what Seekr is?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to. So we’re an AI company. We were founded a few years ago. We really founded at a time and place when there was significant mistrust in all forms of media and government, education, health, and in general with the information we consume, right? We’ve seen this time and time again. You hear things like misinformation, and words like polarization get thrown around quite often and Seekr were really about building your trust and utilizing it for your business needs, privately held where our company, like I said working to deliver a complete end-to-end data platform where what we do is we really have a comprehensive way of scoring content and building a large language models. We really are working to create a much more trustworthy, you know, infoscape and developing capabilities to train our LLMs against standards and principles. It’s really important to us that every piece of content we see, we’re able to score and analyze a rate against a predefined set of standards and principles. Human experts define standards and principles. You know, what makes us a little bit different is we really work hard to have a level of transparency, explainability, and common sense to how we train and tune the models and how we score and analyze content. So that when we’re working across the different categories and for the different clients that we’re serving, folks understand why they’re getting the answers they’re getting. They’re getting greater context and clarity on the information that they’re getting. They’re able to become better critical thinkers to understand like, “Okay, here’s the information I have. Here’s what I need to do with it. Here’s why I’m being sourced and served what I’m being served.” And then they, hopefully can trust that information, that level of transparency that, that we’re working towards delivering is paramount to creating a much more, you know, trust in the AI that folks are using for their business needs.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Adrian Tennant: Each month, in partnership with our friends at Kogan page, the Bigeye Book Club features books by industry thought leaders. Our selection for April is “Sustainable Advertising: How Advertising Can Support A Better Future,” by Matt Bourn and Sebastian Munden.  The book is a manifesto for the advertising industry, highlighting why we need to change the way we work and to change the work we make.  “Sustainable Advertising” incorporates best-in-class case studies and practical guidance, from the ways ads are made and distributed to the products, services, and behaviors they promote.  You can save 25% on a print or electronic version of this month’s featured book using the exclusive promo code, BIGEYE25. This code is valid for all Kogan Page titles, including pre-orders, and their free paperback and e-book bundle offer. Shipping is always complimentary to the US and UK when you order directly from Kogan Page, and it supports the authors as well.  So to order your copy of “Sustainable Advertising” go to KoganPage.com. ​

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Pat LaCroix, EVP of Strategic Partnerships at Seekr Technologies, an artificial general intelligence company that develops and offers responsible, explainable, and trustworthy AI solutions. How did you become involved in Seekr?

Pat LaCroix: So I had the great fortune to meet our founder and CEO Pat Kondo through a mutual acquaintance and started to kind of hear what Pat was building at Seekr and what his vision was, which is really to create a much more trustworthy web. And this idea of rating systems are pervasive in so many walks of life in terms of restaurants, movies, cars, shopping, and whatnot, but our largest sources of information and content and news actually go unrated. And like I said, there’s such a significant lack of trust in so many of the institutions of communication and media and information out there. And Pat’s thesis, and it’s very much held to this day, was like, we need to put a rating system on content so people can understand what to trust, what is reliable, what is credible. And we just started talking more and more about if you could actually, you know, score the web and kind of provide a universal system to score and give transparency and explainability to why you’re receiving the content that you’re receiving and consuming and kind of how this is credible and reliable versus, you know, XYZ standards. Seekr first started and still, we do to stay as we score the news we have over thirty thousand publishers on our platform. Every second of every single day we’re playing a rating system to that news content that is trained and scored against the highest standards of journalism I talk about – industry standards and expert-defined standards. So when it comes to scoring and rating news, we believe using journalistic standards is the best way to do it. So does this article have a byline? Is the headline matching the body of the copy? Is it clickbait? Is there a personal attack? Is this subjective? Is this sourced? What type of piece is this? Is it breaking news? Is it opinion? Is it analysis? All of that really goes into what we do at Seekr and just as I got to know Pat and he was kind of sharing his vision with me, I, by nature, I like to have the opportunity to kind of build and make an impact and do things that, of course, commercially have significant potential, but then also align with my values and enable me to have a higher purpose in the work that I do, my company does, and what we can do in the market. So, yeah, it was really kind of the opportunity to meet with Pat, understand his vision and then understand more about Seekr. You know, Seekr’s predecessor kind of comes through different organizations that Pat has led through government and telco and very talented people. You know, we have over 50 engineers and data scientists and machine learning professionals who like have become real experts at content analysis and web-scale search and creating all sorts of detectors in terms of really understanding kind of what is the heart of the content, what is reliable to the content. The idea here is if we can provide more of a scoring system to really contextualize and provide clarity of what this content is, is it really suitable? We think we enable a much more informed client and, ultimately society at the end of the day, which is a very powerful idea that I just could not stop thinking about, which made me feel like I had to join.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you mentioned earlier that Seekr is developing unique large language models, or LLMs. Why not use an existing model like GPT-4 from OpenAI or Llama from Meta?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah. I mean, obviously, AI is exploding in terms of how pervasive and ubiquitous it is in all forms of life and business and society. And for good reason, I think not to talk about some of those other companies, but for us, we believe artificial intelligence is only as good as the human intelligence that’s informing it. And that we believe having like transparency and explainability and responsibility, kind of tied to how AI is being developed. The inputs and the outputs you get from AI, that’s a key benefit. And for us, a key differentiator. You know, you see it all the time in the news, right? Hallucinations and kind of, you know, bias. That’s really what we are not about. We want to be very clear, logical, have a high level of kind of common sense, accountability, and accuracy to everything we’re delivering. So, you know, we think it’s, that’s paramount of importance. That’s very much in our mission to deliver much more trustworthy AI to help your business needs and use cases. And we’re finding the more and more we’re out there, there’s definitely a market for that. Like I said, people don’t know what to trust. Having the standards and measures in place to really provide much greater transparency and trustworthiness. That’s why you want to come to Seekr.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you’ve explained that one of Seekr’s use cases is content evaluation, rating, and optimization. Now, you recently launched a tool called Align. Can you explain the problems it’s designed to solve and the deliverables Align produces?

Pat LaCroix: Sure. So obviously, you and I both have grown up in the marketing and ad world, and I believe quite a few listeners of this podcast have as well. Align is really geared towards the marketing industry. This notion of brand safety has been around for probably the last five or six years, and the idea of brands trying to figure out with so many choices out there and so much being bought programmatically and the amount of inventory being endless. But brands are often finding that they don’t have control of where exactly their brand and messaging is shown. And then oftentimes it could be showing up against content that is deemed unsafe, idea that violent, it’s abusive, it’s spreading hate, or it’s unsuitable, which is like not really aligned with what a brand’s values are or their target audience’s values. That’s really where Align comes in. You know, today, a lot of the previous offerings, the 1.0s, if you will, out there, they tend to take a well-intentioned, but take an approach of, “All right, well, let’s just have exclusion lists. Let’s just not run our ads against any content that contains XYZ keywords. Let’s ban and avoid all categories altogether.” So things like news, for example. often is on many companies’ exclusion lists, saying, “Okay, we will not advertise on news just because the risk is too great.” Well, what happened then? In that case, news get underfunded. News often in newsrooms and journalism has to run on the ad model, the ad revenue model that supports it. And then if many brands are avoiding news altogether, US journalism and the model that funds journalism is being defunded, then journalism and quality news and quality reporting gets cut, and it becomes less and less. So we’ve worked to create a line in a way because what we do at Seekr is we do not just categorically stamp something as good and bad. Everything we can read, see, hear, watch, we rate. And that’s a big difference. A lot of other offerings out there will do small sample sizes or have a few human beings looking at a few pieces of content and then making a judgment call, or classifying like an entire publisher or entire category and such. And we think that leads to all sorts of false positives and false negatives. So with Align, our ability to see over 30,000 news publishers, we’ve just launched the podcasting space, every piece of content, whether it be an article, an individual podcast episode, we are analyzing and rating against standard of suitability and civility and responsibility. So it’s really trying to give a much more transparent, responsible, explainable view to the advertising market to understand in real-time, what is the most reliable content and what is an appropriate place for them to be running their messages and their dollars. And then also the opportunity there to like, rather than taking a machete to all sorts of categories and topics and genres and saying like, “We will only advertise here. We will not advertise there. Let’s take more of a pruning knife to our media buying and strategy.” And you don’t have to cut out news altogether, you don’t have to cut out true crime altogether. You don’t have to cut up comedy altogether. Yes, there probably are some articles and some shows that are not safe or suitable for your brand, but the vast majority of them are doing good work. So we’ve worked to really develop much more finely tuned signals in real-time to give a much more transparent and reliable view of how suitable content is against an advertiser standards. And then, ideally, that unlocks and opens up the amount of reach and inventory and publishers and creators that the advertisers can support with their dollars, which we think is good for the industry, good for the advertiser, good for the economy.

Adrian Tennant: Well, I want to make sure that we talk about podcasts because I understand that Align actually assigns podcasts and individual episodes a “civility” score. Pat, can you explain what that is?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to. This is a new innovation. Never been done before. We actually just received a patent for how unique the civility score is and how it analyzes audio content in a never done before way. But essentially, this gets at, like I talked about, there are predated standards and ways the industry is technically governed and made decisions along the lines of brand safety and suitability. And those are well-intentioned. And there is some goodness there. We do believe there are some unintended consequences in terms of how things can be labeled one way. And like I said, entire categories, good programming, good podcasts could be completely ignored as a result. So civility was trying to take it away, like, especially when it comes to podcasting, the spoken word, the conversation, that is an open dynamic, creative expression of human communication, and civility is really getting at the idea of the golden rule. So people can have hard conversations, they can have important conversations, they can have contentious conversations, but, you know, if they’re being respectful towards one another, living by that golden rule of treat one another the way you’d want to be treated yourselves, We think that’s a much more responsible way to be thinking about brand safety and suitability in regards to podcasting. So civility, in the simplest form, was defined as the frequency and severity of personal attacks. If people are taking personal attacks towards one another, particularly when it comes to protected classes and kind of insulting, you know, race, gender, orientation, size, shape, whatever it might be, that’s not okay. That’s abusive. That’s hostile. That’s a low bar. But you know, if they’re having hard conversations about being respectful for one another, having informed them to be it back and forth, that by and large should be okay. So let’s have a scoring system that really understands. the spirit of the conversation, and how a conversation is being enabled. And that’s a much, like I said, higher bar to really understand, okay, what is this conversation here? Is this something worth paying attention to? Is this respectful? Is this a healthy dialogue? That’s really where the civility score comes into play. 

Adrian Tennant: Pat, are there any plans to extend this type of analysis, assigning civility scores to other types of media?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to what we’re doing with [?], the answer is yes. So we’re already in podcasting. We’re already across 30,000 sites online, with news. And we’ll continue to grow and expand the volume of new sites and podcasts that we’re, we’re scoring and analyzing as well as going to full-scale web and soon to be video and image detection as well. You know, at Seekr, in addition to our brand safety and suitability analysis that comes through with a line and is supported by a civility score, we also have a political lean filter. We’re able to detect if there’s political bias in a piece of content and whether it leans right, left, center, left center, right center. So, absolutely. And all this is just to inform our partners and give them much more information on what type of content is out there and then give them the choice of what threshold they want to set what types of content do they want to be and giving them greater tools and measures to better identify. The types of content they do and don’t without just categorically. opting in and opting out of topics and avoiding entire themes and genres altogether. That’s absolutely not what we recommend happening and not what we want to see happening. And by doing this, the idea here is we can fight against polarization and prevent brands and advertisers from having to completely sit out the conversation altogether. You know, like I said, there’s a lot of important voices. There’s a lot of important reporting. There’s a lot of important discussion going on out there, but that discussion can only get distributed if it is being supported by advertising dollars. So we really have been working hard to enable and deliver a system that doesn’t restrict and shrink the amount of inventory for advertisers’ support. It’s really quite the opposite of how do we expand and increase the amount of our inventory for advertisers support and really fun quality creative funds diverse voices fund intelligent conversations it’s important for not just the ad industry but our entire industry ecosystem for these things to be happening.

Adrian Tennant: Are there any future developments at Seekr that you’re allowed to talk about focused on serving advertisers or marketers?

Pat LaCroix: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s a huge year coming up. Obviously, things are going to continue to become more heated as we get further along in the year. So we’re going to continue to expand in terms of all that we’re doing in news and podcasts, and we’ll also be expanding into the web as well as into video in short order over the coming year to really opening up the aperture in the marketplace that we’re serving that is a big thing we also was we talked about being a company we have our own foundation model which allows us to build deploy and tune LLMs on behalf of different industries and different customers. So that has a lot of applications, and there is a lot more to come there in terms of what we can do on the generative side, in terms of insights, summaries, chats, and content generation as a whole. Again, we are all kind of grounded and bounded by explainable, transparent, principle-aligned standards that our customers and clients can see and understand and help curate in a way that is tuned in to whatever their business needs and objectives are. So, you know, that’s a big part of our competitive advantages, I believe, how we separate and provide a bit of a unique, differentiated offering in the market.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Pat, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you or Seekr’s AI-powered content evaluation and generation platform, what’s the best way to do so?

Pat LaCroix: Yeah, let’s first focus on Seekr. So it’s S-E-E-K-R. You can look us up at seekr.com. Follow us on LinkedIn. Feel free to send me a note and then reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to take any questions and any feedback anyone has.

Adrian Tennant: Pat, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Pat LaCroix: It’s my pleasure. Really appreciate you having me. Thanks so much.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Pat LaCroix, EVP of Strategic Partnerships at Seekr Technologies. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation and links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction
02:47 – Pat LaCroix’s Career Trajectory
06:09 – Transition to Client-Side Roles
10:54 – Working at Bose Corporation
15:50 – Joining Seekr Technologies
22:14 – Differentiation of Seekr Technologies
23:55 – Introduction of Align Tool
27:56 – Civility Score in Podcasts
32:17 – Future Developments at Seekr Technologies