Magna, Looking To Create A Responsible Media Marketplace

An arm of IPG Mediabrands, Magna, has created a new global leadership position that focuses on ensuring media responsibility and partner relationships. Elijah Harris, who has joined Magna from a sibling agency called Reprise, will be taking up the new position as executive vice president of global digital partnerships.

The appointment and creation of the new role comes amid the industry’s increased focus on diversifying media spend and strategy. Last year Harris led the creation of Mediabrands’ Media Responsibility Index, a tool that allows one to assess the impact of harmful social media content and creates a benchmark for responsibility on social media platforms. The tool also creates a roadmap for improvement in social media responsibility.

The new position reflects and shows Magna’s push to advocate for a more responsible social media marketplace, a goal that has shown increasing importance throughout the past years. In fact, it has not only grown in importance in the advertising industry, but it has grown through the online space as a whole.

With the Mediabrands Media Responsibility Index that was launched last year, IPG demonstrated its commitment and urged that ad world to modernize and keep up with the quickly evolving digital landscape of today. The overall goal of the report was to raise the standards on brand safety and media responsibility all throughout the industry. Principles included within the index assessed the efforts of different social platforms to protect the community they serve, take accountability of mistakes or misdeeds, and work to reduce hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation, which have been plaguing the online community for years.

As of February 2021, social platforms seemed to be slowly improving themselves in terms of brand safety and media responsibility. Mediabrands’ latest Index showed that top social apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, and YouTube have displayed a significant improvement in promoting respect, diversity, advertising transparency, police enforcement and other wonderful principles. The new leadership role at Magna suggests that these principles, and media responsibility overall, will continue to expand as focus points for IPG at a global level. Other agencies may also follow IPG’s decision and begin establishing global leadership positions dedicated to proving system problems within the digital ecosystem. Especially with the rise of importance of social media in society.

Naming Harris, the man who led the creation of the Media Responsibility Index, was a natural yet important step for IPG as it began to integrate media responsibility into its core client approach. At the same time, it also allowed the company to keep his expertise within the IPG family. He will be reporting to Magna U.S. President Dani Benowitz and will serve as “an industry advocate for social media responsibility across all media types within Mediabrands."