Scicomm Media

How Scicomm Media caught 103K+ alerts in 22 months with Outtake

Learn how this media production company uses Outtake to quickly neutralize stealthy social media impersonation attacks and protect their brand’s credibility.

• 103,743 alerts caught in the first 22 months
• 24 hours saved weekly on threat review and remediation
• 90% of takedown requests granted within 7 days

”Outtake neutralizes more threats much faster than any other solution we’ve tried. They’ve been so invaluable to protecting our brand image that I’ve been recommending them to everyone.”
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– Ian Mackey, Vice President of Scicomm Media

About

Scicomm Media is the team behind three of the world's most popular podcasts: Huberman Lab, Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin and David Senra.

Challenge

Maintaining audience trust as social media impersonations proliferate

Since their founding in 2021, Scicomm Media has evolved into a leading voice in science and health podcasts. Their flagship show, Huberman Lab, quickly won over post-COVID audiences with its accessible science discussions and tools for leading a healthier life. As the show grew into the #1 health podcast in the world, its host, Dr. Andrew Huberman, became something of a public figure.

But with this recognition came a new challenge: social media impersonation attacks. Once scammers learned of Dr. Huberman’s popularity, they began trying to profit off his name, identity, and likeness. From organic mentions to sponsored content, fake ads multiplied across platforms.

For Scicomm’s Vice President Ian Mackey, the stakes of these attacks were clear. “People trust us to tell them how to improve their lives,” he explains. “If our brand is associated with illegitimate sources or sponsors, they might question the advice we’re giving.”

That’s why Ian and his team made every attempt to detect and take down these fake ads before they did real harm. However, manually sweeping all attack surfaces for scams consumed more time than Scicomm had to spare—especially because detection also meant their team first needed to identify legitimate mentions of Dr. Huberman from happy listeners. As a result, threats inevitably slipped through the cracks. 

To expand coverage and buy his team some breathing room, Ian initially outsourced threat detection and remediation to a managed service. But the service’s focus on brand infringement cases and reliance on keyword-based searches still left gaps. Attacks that used more sophisticated, multimodal tactics—like a deepfake of Dr. Huberman’s voice—went undetected.

That’s when Ian upgraded to a digital risk platform. While this automated solution detected far more threats than its human-led counterpart, it still left him and his team to manually verify, prioritize, and escalate each threat as hundreds more poured in. And, once the team actually submitted takedown requests, they had to wait in long queues for the content to be removed. This drawn-out process gave scammers leeway to do even more damage in the interim.

Ian knew that if he wanted to truly protect Dr. Huberman’s credibility and all the fans vulnerable to scams in his name, he needed to level up Scicomm’s security posture once again.

Luckily, he didn’t have to look for long. A connection soon recommended Outtake. And within minutes of watching the demo, Ian was sold.

”Finding and taking down all the misuses of Andrew’s name became a full-time job for our team.”

Solution

Round-the-clock threat detection and takedowns with a modern digital trust platform

Outtake gave Ian and the Scicomm team near-superhuman powers, enabling them to identify and crush impersonation attacks at unprecedented speed and scale.

Before launch, the Outtake team sat down with Ian to learn about Scicomm’s existing risk protection workflows. Together, they reviewed the company’s intellectual property policies, real digital assets, and brand guidelines, discussing how Ian’s team would apply them to a series of sample scenarios. With this understanding, Outtake configured their system to find, investigate, and take down scams just as Scicomm would. Only, now it happens autonomously, 24/7.

Ian says the security and efficiency gains were immediate. As soon as he went live, Outtake cut right through the noise of false positives and started rapidly tackling a high volume of impersonation attacks—and didn’t stop.

With Outtake, the team even catches the sophisticated voice impersonations and multimodal threats that manual sweeps and legacy tools routinely miss. Once the system detects one of these threats, it also transcribes the audio for Ian to analyze. That way, he has a record of how the attack works and can correlate incidents if the same threat reemerges.

In fact, even though Outtake has virtually eliminated all the overhead that threat detection and remediation used to require, Ian still enjoys full oversight into the process. Each day, a risk digest is sent to his inbox. This breakdown gives him a 360-degree view of every new threat, where it has spread, how far, and whether it originated with bots or platform users. All his team has to do is accept or override the takedown recommendations before letting Outtake handle the remediation.

And, thanks to Outtake’s close relationships with social media platforms and first-party integrations with web infrastructure providers, these takedown requests are always prioritized over others in the queue.

Now, Ian and his team eliminate threats well before they damage the Scicomm brand or Dr. Huberman’s reputation. He has also found that removing fake ads deters many bad actors for good. “If you can kill their top-of-funnel traffic, you’re effectively shutting down their whole business,” he says. And if that ever changes, he knows Outtake will get any malicious domain or storefront swiftly removed.

As impressed as Ian is with Outtake’s platform, he attributes much of the partnership’s success to their hands-on team. The team is quick to answer Ian’s questions, resolve any issues, and iterate on his feedback. From pushing UI improvements to training their system to detect more subtle threats, they will go to any length to make life easier for Ian’s team and keep Scicomm’s online footprint secure.

”There was no learning curve with Outtake. As soon as we onboarded, we were detecting and dismantling threats. It’s that easy.”

Results

Faster takedowns, valuable time back, and always-on brand protection

With Outtake, Scicomm supercharged their ability to detect and shut down social impersonation attacks—at minimal internal lift.

The results speak for themselves:

• 103,743 alerts caught in the first 22 months
• 24 hours saved weekly on threat review and remediation
• 90% of takedown requests granted within 7 days

Now, Ian and his team confidently protect their podcast community from fraud while securing Dr. Huberman’s status as a leading scientific authority.

Ian also looks forward to a long future with Outtake. He’s especially eager to test out all the platform’s recent updates, including keyboard shortcuts designed to enable bulk takedowns.

Impersonation attacks may be all too common in our current threat landscape, but Ian is glad to be working with a partner at the forefront of solving this systemic problem.

“There are so many scams out there that it’s tempting to throw in the towel. I strongly urge you not to. Outtake makes it possible to defend yourself like never before, and their platform is only getting more powerful by the day.”