Synthetic Media
Synthetic media are not just a low-cost creative opportunity. They're also the most recent, least understood reputational risk a B2B brand must learn to actively protect itself against.
“The newest reputational risk for a B2B brand is no longer just what someone says about you. It's what a deepfake makes someone say, in your voice, who isn't you.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryThe unauthorized external risk
With the spread of increasingly accessible synthetic video and audio generation tools, the most relevant reputational risk for a B2B brand isn't just improper internal use, but the possibility that malicious third parties create plausible fake content involving company executives or the brand itself, for example in fraud schemes exploiting the trust associated with the company name.
A rapid response plan, with verification protocols and denial channels already in place, drastically reduces damage compared to an organization discovering the problem and having to improvise a response while the fake content spreads.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: having no protocol prepared to respond to an unauthorized deepfake or synthetic content involving the brand, improvising a slow, disorganized response while reputational damage accumulates.
Second mistake: internally using synthetic media for marketing content without explicitly disclosing it to the audience, an omission that, if discovered, damages trust far more than the content itself.
Practical Application
A deepfake video imitating a B2B company's CEO, used in a fraud scheme targeting customers, circulates for 6 hours before the company notices, causing 14 reports from confused customers. After introducing a monitoring protocol and a preemptively publicized official verification channel, a similar subsequent incident is publicly debunked within 45 minutes, with measurably lower reputational impact.