Deepfakes, AI and Brand Safety – The New Equation of Brand Communication
David Benguigui, Marketing & Communications Director, Vice President of CMIT, member of Club des Annonceurs, recognized expert in digital communication issues. Through his columns, published notably in Les Échos and Stratégies, he analyzes the transformations of the information ecosystem and their impacts on brand strategies.
The Era of Disinformation and Its Impacts
In your recent columns, you refer to the “metastases” of disinformation. How is this phenomenon redefining the communication landscape for brands today?
The parallel with metastases is not insignificant. Like a disease that spreads insidiously, disinformation infiltrates everywhere and affects the entire information ecosystem. For brands, this fundamentally changes the game: we are no longer just in a logic of reputation building, but also and above all of permanent protection and defense.
Brands now operate in an environment where truth takes time to establish itself, while lies spread at the speed of the algorithm. When fake news about your brand can circle social networks in just a few hours, you no longer have the luxury of traditional response time.
42% of young Europeans get their news via social media. How do you approach this reality?
The business model of these platforms creates a systemic bias: emotion takes precedence over reflection, clash over debate, virality over veracity. For a brand, a rational, constructed, documented message will always be in competition with more emotional content, sometimes false, but more algorithmically performant.
As communicators, we must therefore rethink our strategies: we can no longer be content with being fair and honest; we must also be proactive, emotionally intelligent, and capable of competing in this attention ecosystem.
E-reputation in the Era of Generative AI
Artificial intelligence facilitates the creation of deepfakes. What are the new risks for brand e-reputation?
Deepfakes represent a completely new threat. We have moved from an era where false information could be contradicted by evidence, to an era where this “evidence” itself can be fabricated in an ultra-realistic manner.
An executive whose scandalous video is fabricated, a product whose false images of defects are created, an advertisement precisely altered… By the time you deny it, the damage is done. Most concerning is the desensitization effect: when everything can be false, trust becomes a rare commodity.
How can a brand prepare itself concretely?
The preparation is threefold. First, establish an extremely reactive early warning and monitoring system to detect problematic content before it goes viral.
Second, develop clear response protocols: digital crisis unit, adaptable standard messages, direct communication channels with your communities to react in real time.
Third, build your “intellectual immune system”: a constant, authentic and transparent presence that creates sufficient trust capital so that your audience believes you when you deny false information.
Brand Safety: Beyond Classic Protection
How should brands adapt their brand safety strategy?
Brand safety can no longer be limited to avoiding your ads appearing next to inappropriate content. Your entire communication ecosystem must be rethought from the angle of information security.
We need to develop “information hygiene”: cite your sources, be transparent about your data, avoid sensationalist shortcuts. A brand that adopts these practices protects itself doubly: it reduces its vulnerability to attacks and positions itself as a responsible player.
What role can brands play vis-à-vis platforms?
Their advertising budgets finance these spaces, so they have considerable leverage that they use too rarely. We must collectively demand more: more transparency about algorithms, more efforts in moderation, more resources against disinformation.
Beyond economic pressure, brands can contribute positively by supporting fact-checking initiatives, by funding media education. Brand safety is not built only by protecting yourself, but also by participating in cleaning up the ecosystem.
Lessons from the “Politician-Commodity”
In your column on Donald Trump, you describe the transformation of politics into product. What parallels with brand communication?
Donald Trump has taken to the extreme a logic that also affects brands: message simplification, emotion dominance, virality seeking. His slogan “Make America Great Again” is a textbook case in branding: simple, evocative, memorable, emotional.
But when this logic sacrifices substance for image, truth for message effectiveness, it’s dangerous. Lasting brands find the balance: being audible in the attention economy without sacrificing their integrity, being emotionally engaging without being manipulative, being simple without being simplistic.
Should we follow or avoid these new standards?
That’s the trap to avoid. What we must remember is the importance of consistency and authenticity. The American president built a strong brand because it is consistent, predictable, recognizable. Brands should draw inspiration from this consistency, less from his methods.
The real challenge is to resist short-termism. Outrageousness can generate buzz, but trust is built over time. In a world where everything can be fake, authenticity becomes your best asset.
Youth Education: A Strategic Investment
You advocate for critical thinking education. How is this also an issue for brands?
It may be counterintuitive, but an audience better trained in critical thinking is in the interest of responsible brands. Training our audiences, particularly young people, to verify sources and take a step back from their emotions also means training them not to believe the first fake news about your company.
It’s investing in a healthier information environment, where honest brands have a competitive advantage. Some avant-garde brands have understood this well and are investing in media education programs. It’s intelligent marketing: you build your responsible brand image while creating the conditions for a more mature and lasting relationship with your audiences.
Prevention Rather Than Cure: Anticipation as a Shield
Faced with these threats, is it better to react or anticipate?
Without a doubt: prevention is better than cure. When a disinformation crisis breaks out, you’re already in a position of weakness. Reaction time, even fast, lets the lie get ahead. And we know that “when truth takes the stairs, lies take the elevator.”
Anticipation first means building this trust capital we talked about upstream. But it also means equipping yourself with tools that allow you to establish proof of authenticity. In the era of deepfakes and manipulated content, being able to instantly prove the authorship of content becomes a major strategic issue.
Solutions such as Certiphy.io are moving in the right direction since they precisely allow you to certify your content in real time, thus creating an unfalsifiable digital fingerprint. When content is wrongly attributed to you or one of your communications is hijacked, you have irrefutable and immediate proof of authenticity — or falsification. It’s a paradigm shift: you’re no longer in a logic of denial after the fact, but of preventive certification.
This proactive approach thus completely changes the equation: instead of suffering and repairing, you anticipate and protect. It’s like affixing a seal of authenticity on each of your communications, making any manipulation instantly detectable and demonstrable.
