How Ad Dollars, And Some AI, Might Restore Our Shared Truth — With Vanessa Otero

0:00An advertising CEO who wants to restore our shared truth by directing ad dollars to publications with a reasonable amount of bias. joins us right after this. LinkedIn presents.

0:17Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined by a great guest today. Vanessa Otero is the CEO of AdFontis Media, which rates publications on how they're biased and lets advertisers buy ads based on those ratings. It's one of the more fascinating companies I've come across in my years as a reporter, and I'm so excited to bring you this conversation today. Vanessa, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Alex. Thanks for being here. Let's start here. It's clear that our shared truth has kind of dissolved, right?

0:49There are people in the US and all over the world who can look at the same news story and either look at it completely different with a different set of facts, or maybe even some folks on one side of the political aisle won't even know that a story is happening where all another side is gonna be fully tuned into it. So I'm curious from your perspective, how did you initially realize that this was a problem because you're trying to solve it? And what can we do about it? Well, this all started for me back in the 2016 election. And the way that people would fight about news and politics on Facebook in particular, back when there was lots of news shared on the news feed, people would share really biased and unreliable sources with each other.

1:34and I noticed that people couldn't convince each other of their points, right? Like people would just completely discard the media from the other side. And it appeared to be this function of the fact that we had so many more news and information sources than we ever had before. So it was really easy for people to get into their own little filter bubbles. I mean, in the years right before that, that's when that term was really coined. And like you said, there's no shared truth. I noticed that folks would, they'd have divisions because of both polarization, but also because of, you know, people broadly call misinformation.

2:19Like it makes sense that people on the left and right political divides, you know, don't see eye to eye because they don't see, you know, read and hear the same things. But misinformation is like that too. Like if you have one set of folks that believes a certain set of facts and others just don't believe those facts, that creates division in that way as well. So what this all started out as was an infographic just to plot out a few dozen of the news sources that are out there to show that there's a difference between stuff that's highly reliable, stuff that's okay, stuff that's really problematic, things that are left and right, and things that are even more so.

3:00So I am kind of curious, like, okay, these are big things that you're going to tackle, bias and misinformation. How do you even begin to consider doing this in a way that's not politically motivated? The answer is you have to get super granular. So for us, that means human analysts from left, right, and center looking at individual articles, individual episodes, individual TV and podcast content in order to look at sentences, headlines, graphics, all the things that make it up to come to a rating on that. You know, maybe the idea is, and I think this is what your idea is, right? You know, don't eliminate the idea of biased publications or publications that reflect one political standing or another, but sort of concentrate the ad spend into those that still are, you know, that believe in the shared truth versus are extremely skewed.

3:58Is that what you're trying to do? And how does that happen? So when we first approached ad tech companies and brands and publishers, like the whole idea was, you know, we want to help it change the incentives in the media ecosystem. And we thought that the brand's biggest use for our data would be to help them avoid extremely polarizing and misleading and inaccurate content because it's bad for society. And also it's probably bad for the brand, right? But when we started approaching more and more brands, we found so many of them would tell us like, well, that's not really a problem for us because we just don't advertise in news anymore at all.

4:43And to me, that seemed like worse, right? Because you have this worst of all possible worlds where the misleading, highly polarizing content, it's fairly cheap to produce, right? You don't need... You can have a person or five with a website and you can churn out just rage clickbait material pretty easily and get enough programmatic ad dollars to stay afloat, you're great. But then the high-quality investigative reporting, the editorial newsroom stuff, that's expensive. So if you have enough brand pulling away from that kind of content, then you see this degradation in our media landscape where good journalism suffers and the garbage out there thrives.

5:32So that's what we're really trying to change in the ecosystem. Right. And you wrote a op-ed recently in Pointer, and you said this one sentence that to me really stuck out, which is that brand safety, this rush toward brand safety is misguided. I mean, it seems to me logical that brands would want to put their ads on content that is not controversial. So why do you think it's misguided? Yeah. So the brand safety as an industry only really got started within the last 10 or 12 years. And I think the first big moments in this brand safety movement were around YouTube videos where there are terrorists beheading people and ads were showing up next to that kind of content, like this user-generated content.

6:20So companies rushed in to provide solutions around, oh, let's not show up next to things that are violent. Let's not show up next to things that are sexually explicit. it. Let's try to screen out bad words and do this at scale. And it sort of grew and grew and grew to this place where it's like anything that's kind of yucky at all, brands are like, okay, let's stay away from that. Let's not put our advertising dollars next to it. And that came to encompass news. However, there's not great data. There's not really any data that shows that brands suffer any sort of backlash from consumers if they're advertising in high quality news.

7:10Examples I give, Wall Street Journal, a few months ago, they had an expose about Instagram and how sexually explicit content with minors was showing up on Instagram. And it was like this investigative reporting that was pretty important. And in the Wall Street Journal, they have embedded ads from lots of big brands. And there was no backlash to those brands for appearing adjacent next to content that was reporting about this unpleasant subject. No one said, oh, that advertiser, or they support child porn on Instagram. No one says that, right? But the brand safety tools that exist to keep folks away from news, they're so broad.

8:04Like so many brands use keyword blocking lists and category exclusions in order to stay away from anything that's quote controversial or quote negative. And it's just swung too much in that direction that it's really hurting news publications. And you say that more than 80 % of advertising has evaporated from the news business since 2005 as print has collapsed. So how much of this money moving away from the news business is due to the collapse of print? And how much of it is due to the fact that advertisers just don't want to be on news stories anymore? Well, it's a combination of a lot of things, right?

8:41A lot of things have changed in the news and technology landscape since 2005. I mean, you have the rise of Google and Facebook. I mean, so much spend that was going towards news moved over to search and these walled gardens, right? So it's not just that brands have moved away from news, but the brand safety movement has certainly not helped. And it's ironic because in social media platforms, brand safety is very opaque. There are really no guarantees on it. So it's ironic that brands would say, well, we don't want to advertise next to news because it's not safe. Yet they'll just put that money in Facebook, X, YouTube, where there's really not a lot of insight for those brands into the brand safety on those platforms.

9:40Okay, so let's dig in a little bit into how your team rates. You know, it's kind of interesting. You brought it up that they look at sentences and they rate it based off of factual integrity. And there's someone from the right, left, and the center there. But what is the actual process? Like, how are you really able to tell if a story is like right, left, or center bias? For instance, like the New York Times there skews a little left, and the Wall Street Journal skews a little right in your chart. They're both like within the respect, the fact. obviously, I guess maybe not obviously, people might have a bone to pick on that in the respect of fact category.

10:17So how do you rate each story? Well, the overall news source ratings, like you mentioned, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, being a little to the left and to the right, respectively, their ratings are based on a representative sample of content. And for each one of them, we've rated hundreds of articles manually over the last several years. And so for each article we rate, it's a panel of three folks. So, I mean, this is as work-intensive as it sounds. All day, every day, in shifts on Zoom, you have panels of three analysts at a time just going through article after article after article, episode after episode.

10:58And they're looking at certain factors for reliability and certain factors for bias. And it's akin to a grading rubric for a paper, like an AP test or something, or if you're trying to grade something that's inherently a bit subjective, like gymnastics or figure skating, we're looking for certain things. And once folks are trained in our content analysis methodology, they can systematically look for those things and arrive at pretty consistent ratings. What are you looking for? So the subfactors for reliability are, you know, one, the headlines and images, like how well those match the story. Two, expression is a really big one.

11:45So how it's expressed as fact, as analysis, or opinion, or worse. And then the main one, the one that folks think of immediately is veracity, like likelihood of veracity. And this is the one that trips people up philosophically because they're like, well, you know, how do you tell what's true? Look, there are things that are truer than others, right? And there are things that you can be 99 % sure. There are things that you can be like 60 % sure. So we're looking for the likelihood of veracity of underlying claims to the best of our ability by looking at other primary sources and other reporting on the internet.

12:28Like, We can do lateral reading. That's like the primary way that folks who teach media literacy teach people how to evaluate whether something's true or not. And for bias, we're looking at different sub factors, too. Like there's the language that people use to characterize their issues or opponents, right? You can use adjectives to describe a politician as senile or decrepit or cunning, right? All those matter. There's the terminology that you use for the positions like illegal aliens versus undocumented persons, right? We're looking for the advocacy of political positions. Some have it, some don't.

13:15we're looking at the comparison between different articles about the same topic. So each one of those sub factors is one that we can use to triangulate and measure like an actual score for bias in a rubric. And then you apply those ratings to different tranches of media that an ad buyer can go in and basically be like, all right, like, give me the ad fontis group that is, you know, let me, I'm going to just pull up your chart. That one that, you know, might be middle skews left and skews right, but isn't hyper-partisan right or left. And maybe within like the realm of truth of, you know, opinion or wide varieties and reliability or just like, you know, most analysis or mix of fact is a mix of fact reporting and analysis or fact-based reporting.

14:04So is that they can sort of pick like the buckets that they want and then go to an advertising technology platform and say, give me these? Yeah, exactly. I mean, generally, for most brands that want to advertise in news or do advertise in news, they want to stay towards the top middle, not exactly right in the middle, like centrist. Like I said, there's nothing wrong with left and right bias. And there's a certain analysis and opinion content that's very palatable to advertisers and has great audiences. So yeah, we basically allow advertisers to select and get back into news based on being on the higher reliability side and the minimally biased side.

14:52Interesting. So talk a little bit about how long the company has existed, how long this product has existed, and what tangible results have you shown so far from your efforts? Yeah. I mean, we have been around as a company for a little over five years. We're a public benefit corporation. So, you know, we're a for-profit company with a stated public mission. You know, this all started because we wanted to help folks navigate the news landscape. And that's all the stakeholders in news media, whether it's individual consumers, just figuring out for themselves what's reliable and biased, whether it's educators teaching media literacy.

15:31But advertisers, publishers, and social media companies all have such a huge role to play in this. And our data has really come into its own in the last two, two and a half years, or that's the time period during which we've had dozens of analysts. We have now rated nearly 10 ,000 different individual news sources. So it's a lot of data out there, right? And since it's now available in DSPs and is selectable, it's... Which is basically, for those listening, a DSP is a place you buy online ads. Yes, I'm sorry. I just jumped right into the ad tech terminology. Happens to me all the time. I know.

16:18It's selectable in the places where you can buy media. So we're really optimistic. mistake, we're really hopeful with what we've seen so far with advertisers, major advertisers in all the different verticals using our data to get back into news responsibly because it's been encouraging, right? Our message has been well-received. People know that they should advertise in good journalism and avoid the misleading, polarizing stuff. It's just they haven't had good ways to do it before. So the advertisers aren't coming to you and saying we want the hyper-partisan, not true stuff. It's mostly advertisers saying we want some reasonably biased publications that respect the facts.

17:08Yeah, exactly. Like no one wants to advertise on the hyper-partisan, like misleading content on purpose. Like I really haven't had any advertisers that are like, yes, our audience is there. Let's go. Let's go after that. Like, you know, advertisers have like this. You could. If you're my pillow, you might want to use this stuff. But anyway, I digress. People do bring that up. And sure, advertisers, for the most part, try to block this stuff. There's enough energy around, enough self-awareness to know that they shouldn't advertise on misleading, extremely polarizing content. A lot of it ends up there on accident, right?

17:52It's the ad tech ecosystem is opaque. Sometimes it's not that easy to control exactly where your advertisers run, especially on the internet. So yeah, no one's come to us saying like, yes, we want to target the most extremes. Do you have a sense as to how much money you think you've brought back into news? How much total spend has gone through with your data? and can you name some names of advertisers that are using this stuff? You know, it's hard to say, you know, dollar wise, but we do have, we just launched this billion dollar challenge to get advertisers back to news in this 20, especially in this 2024 election cycle.

18:33So we're still pretty early. That's a challenge that we issued just within the last month or so. And it's funny that you ask about particular brands. I'm not going to mention any names without prior express permission because when it comes to things like political, how biased stuff is, and how ad brands make decisions about where they advertise, as you can imagine, some are a little sensitive. So hopefully within the next few weeks, our billion-dollar challenge will have some brands that we can talk about that will endorse. us. That's what we're actually looking for. We're looking for brands to step up to the plate and say, yes, this is something that not only we do in practice, but we believe in and want to put our name on it.

19:23So I want to be fully frank about the challenge that this is. So many big brands are afraid of news and of putting themselves out there and saying like, yes, we're going to draw this line in the sand about reliability and bias. That's why newsrooms continue to suffer because brands have been so hesitant, especially in recent years. So then what, I mean, I guess like from my standpoint as a journalist trying to see how real this is, like, you know, what should convince us that this is something that's going to actually take off and lead to a spend that helps restore, you know, it helps invigorate publications that respect the truth and aren't skewed hyper-partisan, helps reinvigorate them financially, and that this thing can actually accomplish its mission versus something that's, you know, a cool idea in principle, but might just never take off because of these hesitancies.

20:25We don't know that for sure. That's the thing. I mean, that's the unknown part. You know, we're a startup where we have not, we have not yet proven that we can successfully bring back so many brands to advertising and news that it's going to make a difference in the success and monetization of good, of good publishers. And that's a scary place to be in, I think, for our democracy, right? Right. Publishers have been struggling with this for a while. I mean, we talked to major publishers like some of the biggest names out there who during 2020, 2022 coverage of COVID coverage of like the protests after George Floyd's murder.

21:18Right. The negativity and news, like everything in the news was negative. right and publishers would say to me you know our um our readership went up up up up up our monetization just went down down down because branch was just like oh no we don't want to be around covid coverage we don't want to be about around coverage about black lives matter we don't want to be around around this stuff and so i don't have a guarantee for you for anybody that my company, as much as people say that they love this idea, they say, oh, yes, we definitely want to support journalism and branches to support democracy.

21:59No guarantees, right? So that's why we're issuing this call to action, this billion-dollar challenge. It's going to take some changes. The trend has not been good for publishers. The responsibility of brands, it hasn't been, they have not been stepping up to the plate, right? So I'm an optimist and I think it can work, but we need people to jump in the boat with us. Vanessa Otero is here with us. She's the CEO of AdFontis Media. We'll be back in the second half for some more questions about the business model and maybe what we're going to see heading into the 2024 election. Back right after this.

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25:02And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Vanessa Otero, the CEO of AdFontis Media. Vanessa, you've also, you've written in depth about what you're planning to do here. So a couple more questions for you about the, what happens, the impact, you know, should this succeed? So first of all, you write, as you veer off to the left or the right, quality and trust drop precipitously. So I'm curious when you write something like that, like, how do you answer like the both sides argument that people might say like, well, like, you know, okay, like, you know, you might have some of this stuff on the left and some of this on the right, but the magnitude isn't the same.

25:38So when you putting it in the same sentence, some people might not be fans of it. I'm curious what, I mean, I personally think that like, yes, there are problems on both sides of the political spectrum here, but how do you answer that argument? Well, just because there are two sides to an issue doesn't mean that they're equal and opposite. Like if you think about a case in court, right? There's always two sides. And what we're trying to do is be judges of the content. And a judge, you're not asking a judge to be neutral. You're asking a judge to be fair, right? What I mean by that is at the end of the day, the judge doesn't say like, oh, well, you both have a point, good luck.

26:17You ask the judge to make a call, which side has a better argument. And the side with a better argument on a particular issue tends to be the one that has better facts, more facts tied to their analysis and their conclusions. You're right that folks on the left and the right will point to the other side and say, well, they're worse because of x y and z and the nature of what's like far left and what's far right on our chart are are different right you'll notice if you look really closely especially at our interactive media bias chart and at our our web uh our web chart versus our podcast chart there is a there are more bright-leaning websites there's just literally a larger number objectively effectively of sites that have misleading, inaccurate information.

27:21It's just like a bigger ecosystem over there. So folks on the right will point to that and say, well, that just means that your chart is biased because there's more stuff on the right. I mean, I don't think that's what it does mean. It's not that there's not misleading content on the left. And there's a lot less website content that's specifically tailored towards left-leaning, misleading, inaccurate information. But you go to podcasts, though, there's a nice little universe that's long form. You see this in video, too. You can find a lot of YouTube channels that are left-leaning, that are conspiratorial, right?

28:04So it's just not the exact same content universe on each side. So, you know, just because two sides exist doesn't mean they're doing exactly the same thing. On the right, we do see while there is more misleading and inaccurate content, you'll rarely see bad words, for example. It's something that on the right folks tend to refrain from. However, on the left, like really partisan, you know, left-leaning opinion propaganda stuff, tons of curse words, tons of, you know, tons of really vile personal insults. So that's not exactly the same thing. Those are just the things that move things towards the bottom of the chart on each side.

28:55Another argument that folks might make is, well, what happens if this company ends up skewing some of these big brand dollars to one political side or the other? So is your goal to proportionally direct ad dollars to like sort of reasonably biased right and left sites? Or like what happens, for instance, if a lot of the money that ends up coming in, you know, using your data ends up going to left leaning sites or right leaning sites? Is that still a win for you because they're going to more reasonable news or is that something that you want to stay away from? we want to direct ad dollars towards more highly reliable sites and there are highly reliable sites on on the left and the right so yeah and i don't want to you know duck this question i i talked about how the like the right leaning sites uh how there's more like misleading um in inaccurate ones like below like a low threshold on our chart well one uh so folks on the left look at that and they're like, ha ha, see, I was correct.