Burson ties reputation to ROI with AI tool

Burson has unveiled a new product, Reputation Capital, designed to quantify reputation as a business asset and link it directly to financial outcomes like stock price, sales and purchase intent. The AI-driven platform, accessible via WPP Open, promises to offer companies live insights into how shifting reputational signals affect commercial value—and how to act on them.

Launched globally today, Reputation Capital combines real-time data analysis, proprietary AI models and strategic communications consulting. According to the agency, it marks a shift from retrospective reputation measurement to predictive intelligence—something it argues is essential amid today’s volatile information cycles.

“Reputation is the most valuable asset that any organisation possesses,” said Burson’s global CEO, Corey duBrowa. “But traditional tools can’t keep up with the volume and velocity of challenges clients face.” The new platform, he says, addresses that gap by helping brands identify specific drivers of perception, anticipate the impact of actions, and tie these insights to tangible business outcomes.

Burson India CEO, Deepshikha Dharmaraj, echoed this positioning. “Reputational Capital gives us a more tangible, AI-powered solution for understanding and even predicting that impact… It empowers us to move beyond traditional metrics,” she noted.

The technology relies on eight “reputation levers,” such as governance, innovation, leadership and social responsibility, to calculate a live score. This score, Burson claims, can highlight what’s working, what needs fixing, and how a particular narrative or news event may play out.

Predictive analysis, not just postmortems

Chad Latz, Burson’s global chief innovation officer, positioned the product as a corrective to what he called “backwards-looking” reputation management. “Reputation Capital changes the game by providing a dynamic understanding of a brand’s reputation and predicting the impact of actions relative to key business metrics,” he opined.

According to Burson, the platform is capable of processing inputs from social, owned, and third-party data sources around the clock. These are then mapped against reputational risk and opportunity forecasts—by geography, audience segment or sector—alongside guidance from its advisory teams.

But the platform’s centrepiece is its modelling capability that seeks to show how reputation affects shareholder value. One profiling study of unnamed tech sector firms found that weekly returns shifted an average of 0.97% in direct correlation with changes in reputation scores. Depending on the company, this translated to as much as $38 billion in perceived value.

In one example provided by Burson, a single-point increase in a Reputation Capital score equated to $2.4 billion in added shareholder value for a profiled technology company.

Beyond PR, into the boardroom?

The ambition for Burson here appears to be about repositioning reputation management as more than a communications concern. “This profiling exercise underscores the critical role of reputation in driving financial outcomes,” duBrowa said, adding that it gives boards a more concrete way to treat reputation as a quantifiable asset.

Grant Toups, Burson’s global chief digital and intelligence officer, pointed to the ability to assess which elements—such as governance or creativity—have the greatest impact. “By transforming perception into actionable intelligence, we can help clients make reputation a distinct and quantifiable competitive advantage,” he claimed.

The tech behind the platform includes Decipher, Burson’s proprietary cognitive AI system developed in collaboration with Limbik. The solution has been validated by Augmented Intelligence Labs, a University of Oxford-affiliated enterprise.

Dr Felipe Thomaz, who co-founded the lab, described the platform as “an exceptionally advanced” tool. He stated that the offering the “most actionable intelligence” on the market, without clarifying how it compares to alternatives.

Part of a larger identity overhaul

Reputation Capital is the latest addition to the Burson Innovation Portfolio—a suite of AI-enabled tools also including Sonar, Creators, Specialists and the Fount Suite. These are core components of WPP Open, WPP’s marketing operating system that leans heavily on automation, audience segmentation, and real-time creative testing.

The launch comes just months after Burson formally emerged from the merger of BCW and Hill & Knowlton, two legacy WPP firms, in January 2025. Burson will officially begin operating under its unified brand identity from July. BCW, a long-time name in the industry, will be retired as a brand.

The broader Burson Group now consists of several rebranded or integrated agencies, including Hill & Knowlton, GCI Health, tech-focused Axicom, financial and capital markets agency Buchanan (soon to be Burson Buchanan), and other units like Direct Impact and Prime Policy Group. Agency brands previously under Hill & Knowlton, such as 3K and JeffreyGroup, also fall under the new umbrella.

The company has positioned its post-merger proposition around reputation-led business advisory, framed by a four-pillar methodology spanning company actions, communications, social narratives, and stakeholder beliefs.

It also revealed a new visual identity “inspired by the power of light,” which—according to its internal narrative—is meant to reflect its goal of helping clients “illuminate insights and reveal opportunity.”

For agencies and marketers, the launch underscores a broader trend: the growing convergence of corporate reputation, financial metrics, and machine learning. It also raises questions around accountability—both for platforms like Reputation Capital and the communicators who rely on them.

Burson is not the first to connect reputation to business outcomes. But it may be among the first to aggressively productise this concept using proprietary AI and plug it into a holding company’s martech stack. Whether this approach gains traction—or sets a new benchmark for how reputation is managed—will depend less on the platform’s promise and more on how companies operationalise it beyond the comms department.

As firms increasingly seek to assign measurable value to intangible assets, this move signals a clear intent: to recast reputation from a PR concern into a core business performance driver.

Whether this shift delivers results—or simply reframes old metrics in shinier packaging—is something agency clients and marketers will likely watch closely.