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Ep. 68 News Bias & Free Speech in Ad Tech with Vanessa Otero from Ad Fontes Media
00:25:12
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- [00:00]
Ad Tech God
This episode is brought to you by Zeta Global. Do you know what it takes to transform marketing into a data driven profit center? Are you able to align the C suite around your AI vision and strategy? Zeta Global has the Playbook to help you get started. Download Driving growth in the AI era today at ZetaCMO AI book again, that's Zeta CMO book. Welcome to the adtech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, Ad Tech God. Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your go to for conversations with attorneys turned advertising CEOs. I'm excited to chat with Vanessa Otero, the CEO and founder of Ad Fontas. Some may be familiar with Ad Fontes and others may not. But in short, Advantas Media rates news sources by reliability and political bias, which in essence helps readers navigate those news sources more confidently. This also comes into play with advertisers as they consider where they do and do not want to advertise. I'm looking forward to meeting Vanessa today. Vanessa, welcome to the AdTech Godpod.
- [01:19]
Vanessa Otero
Thanks so much for having me. AdTech God.
- [01:22]
Ad Tech God
Thanks. Thank you. It's nice to have an attorney on here. Nice to meet you. Love that you slightly pivoted into a different industry.
- [01:29]
Vanessa Otero
Little bit different industry.
- [01:31]
Ad Tech God
Can I ask you, I love to kind of understand where people come from and why they entered the advertising or ad tech industry. Can you kind of go through how you moved from being an attorney into starting at Fontes?
- [01:44]
Vanessa Otero
Absolutely. And I did not know even in starting Ad Fontes that I would end up in the ad tech industry. So even more circuitous. I mean, my background before I was a lawyer, I was in sales. You know, spent 10 years mostly in B2B sales and went to law school, became a patent attorney. I ended up practicing for a total of six years. And I actually really liked my law job. I mean, you hear of a lot of lawyers who don't like the practice of law and they get burned out and they quit and they just do something else. But I actually really liked being a patent lawyer because of all the lawyer jobs. It's like you get to work with inventors and entrepreneurs and it's a happy kind of law. You're not dealing with people in like the worst crises of their lives, like you're helping them invent stuff. So I created Ad Fontes out of something that I was just tinkering with as a hobby because I've said this on many appearances before, but I'm a giant nerd in like every Sense. And I have always been super interested in like news and politics, but also like good argumentation. So as an English major, I was a lawyer. So like, words, rhetorical analysis, I just love that stuff. So in the run up to the 2016 election, I noticed that people were sharing a lot of unreliable news sources with each other and failing to convince each other because of the bias of those news sources. And I created this media bias chart, which was truly just a hobby to talk to my friends about the news sources they consume and then went viral and just took over my life. I know you can relate about just like tinkering with something and. And then it takes over your life.
- [03:26]
Ad Tech God
Yeah, I know.
- [03:27]
Vanessa Otero
I know the feeling on social media in particular because everybody on the Internet had an opinion about the bias and reliability of the news sources that they and others consumed. So a ton of feedback. And it was just this project that took over my life. Like, I kept talking to folks about it and would come out with new versions of the chart based on feedback. And the things that people kept saying were like, what's the data behind this and what's the methodology? And ooh, can you add some more news sources? And then the other thing I would get was, well, this chart is biased because you're biased. And I was like, well, that's true, so how could I make it less biased and then like answer all these like questions that people had about the data and the methodology. So long story short, I mean, I ended up creating this whole company where we rate the news for reliability and bias and that's what we are primarily. But it turns out in order to monetize that kind of data, you sort of have to build an ad tech company too. So we're an accidental ad tech company. I mean, three, three and a half years ago, I didn't know what a DSP was, and now we're integrated in the major ones. I mean, the learning curve is very steep. But much like a journalism outlet is a, you know, they primarily do a thing which is like journalism. They also have to have this whole apparatus to plug into the advertising monetization. They have to build an ad tech capability. So that's how I view us in, in ad tech world.
- [05:04]
Ad Tech God
You mentioned as a patent lawyer, you were working with a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs. You think that helped you pull the trigger? Just go and just do it and say, you know what, I'm going to go for it. I think I'm onto something good. I've seen these other entrepreneurs and inventors and now I want to be one too.
- [05:20]
Vanessa Otero
Oh, for sure. Because I was in sales and so I had this little entrepreneurial bug and I still live in Westminster, Colorado, which is in between Denver and Boulder, and I practice in Boulder. And this, the Colorado startup community is pretty robust. You know, it's not like San Francisco or New York, but it's quite robust. So I felt like it would be easy to get into the networks of the startup world. And I had a handful of contacts. I figured, you know, maybe I could raise some money, like really build something. And I felt like that was within my, within the realm. And I was like, it'll be hard.
- [05:58]
Ad Tech God
But I think that's something I'm, I'm, I'm going through as well. Is, you know, I had to explain that if I'm not working that who else is doing this? And so it turns into, you know, when you work at a company with 20 people or a hundred people or 10,000 people, you can step away and really not look at your phone or your email for a week. And the company just continues to move forward with this. It's nearly impossible to step away for half a day without, you know, checking and responding to someone. I think that's been the biggest learning for me is, holy crap, this, this is a lot more work than I ever thought.
- [06:31]
Vanessa Otero
I can totally relate.
- [06:33]
Ad Tech God
So we've had some changes in our government recently. We have a new president. We're seeing some things changing in political landscape overall. You just published a great article with Ad Exchanger and I wanted to ask you a couple questions about if that's okay with you. So one of the things that you, you mentioned in that article is you, you highlight how some government officials are pressuring these advertisers to not spend on certain political or conservative outlets. Can you kind of explain that to me and how the pressures that people get could conflict with First Amendment rights?
- [07:12]
Vanessa Otero
Yeah, well, the issue is that there are, you know, Jim Jordan, who's a chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Brennan Carr, who's about to be the or is the FCC commissioner. Have you at various different stages written letters or launched inquiries into advertising groups and in agencies and companies, and they're not pressuring them to advertise in a particular area. The inquiries are about whether these companies are choosing not to advertise on certain news outlets, particularly right leaning news outlets. That's the accusation from, you know, Jim Jordan's committee and then from Brendan Cart's accusations towards tech companies that they're censoring by somehow encouraging companies not to Advertise next to conservative or right leaning content like on X or on certain news sites. So the first amendment has various protections and one of them is right to free speech. The limitation is very heavy handed on the government. Like the government can't limit speech. This gets cloudy for folks because leaders of private companies like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk saying that like we want to provide free speech, everybody should have free speech. When they talk about it, what they're really talking about is an ethic of free speech, not their legal obligation. Under the First Amendment, private companies are allowed to limit speech. Like your employer can tell you to not put a bumper sticker on your car. And like the government can't do anything about the bumper sticker on your car, but your employer can fire you. So private companies like Facebook and Twitter, they have the right to moderate what's on their platforms to take things down. And they do that especially regarding things like sexual abuse or drug content. You know, things like that, things that are not necessarily legal, but they find them unsavory, unpleasant for their users and so they moderate those and take those down. Same thing with, they could do that with false and misleading content. And they have to various degrees over the years. They're also actually extra protected by a law, section 230 of the Communications Decency act, which was enacted in the 90s to limit the liability of these tech platforms. So they're not only allowed to moderate content by this law, but they're also protected from anybody who sues them for what somebody posts on their platform. So even if they don't moderate, they're not liable. They're like protected every which way.
- [10:06]
Ad Tech God
That's pretty incredible. There's so like I understand the right of free speech in, in a private company scenario that there's, there's limitations there. A lot of these platforms are now talking about, especially on X, like you hear it all the time. Like we are now the media, we are now the press, you are the press. What is the difference I guess between what would be considered free press and free speech?
- [10:29]
Vanessa Otero
No, I mean the first amendment outlines five like specific rights and people don't typically remember that. It's like five separate things in there. But it's like first amendment is freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly like to gather, and freedom to petition your government for redress. So freedom of speech, there's a huge body of case law on like what is speech and what can the government regulate? You know, one of the points I make in this ad exchanger article is that it's not only like what the government can tell you, like not to say, it can also not compel you to say something. Like within free speech, there's just all these sort of subsections and nuances and like what is speech and what's not, who has speech, corporations, people, et cetera. And the freedom of the press is the right of journalists to go out and investigate and write and publish things that they discover that are, that are true. They have quite a bit of protection around that without being like jailed again by the government, you know, without having that right restricted by the government. So there isn't a definition of like what constitutes a press in the Constitution. And there's actually little to no case law on like, what is the press. And as you see in this modern information landscape, who is a journalist to your point? Like, we are the media, we are the press. You have journalists, you have news influencers, there's no barrier to entry. Like you don't have to have a journalism degree, you don't have to have a certain credential or experience in order to be practicing like the doing the practice of journalism. So to the extent it would be contested, it would be pretty widely applied. Like the work that a lot of folks do to bring truth to audiences would be considered the work of the press and protected.
- [12:22]
Ad Tech God
What direction do you think things are heading in? I guess the political space is pretty heated up, if that's the right term. And it goes across the entire spectrum, like depending on where you sit on that political scale. What is the direction, the way publishers and news sources are changing over the next few years from your opinion?
- [12:41]
Vanessa Otero
It's really divergent. It really depends on what the purpose of the publisher is. And different publishers have to define the things that they're going for. I mean, over the last 30 years, the prevalence of prominence of really partisan media is proliferated so much because it's so fragmented. So if you want to make money, if you wanted to gain influence, there are some slower and faster ways to do that, especially if you're small. Like if you're just say one person with a podcast or a website, a newsletter, it's just you and maybe a handful of folks that you work with. One of the fastest ways to gain an audience is to put out like really vitriolic content, like very partisan content you can find. If you can get an audience of a thou, a hundred thousand people or a million people, you can really make some money with that. And user generated content. Platforms have really made that easier for folks. So YouTube, all social media, podcast platforms, et cetera. And it's so different from what large news organizations have done in the past. Now large news organizations, like large national newspapers or like TV broadcasters, even local papers that have a few dozen reporters, you know, they now compete for attention with everyone else with like the solo and small. And so, you know, there are good things and bad things about that, but it's really required a lot of adjustment by the larger ones and sometimes in directions that have not been super beneficial. So if a large news outlet that has hundreds of journalists is like, oh no, we gotta compete with these like podcasters, then they might just publish more opinion, they might publish more biased stuff. And that has led to a loss. Like the prevalence of biased opinion in news outlets is really strongly related to the reduction in trust. Because if you publish a bunch of left leaning opinion, then folks on the right are not going to trust you. If you publish a bunch of right leaning opinion, folks on the left aren't going to trust you and they're not going to trust you for your journalism. The journalism that's like not meant to be biased, it's meant to be straightforward. So I don't know if this is truly where this is going. It's gotten fragmented. It will continue to get more fragmented probably before it consolidates again. But like any industry, there's often periods of fragmentation and then reconsolidation. You see it in streaming, you see it in everything. And news outlets. What I hope is that the larger ones that have like editorial infrastructure really focus in on the work that they can uniquely do, which is journalism. Like anybody can publish opinion, it's a commodity. Like you don't need to have a editorial stuff to do that. Not everybody can do journalism because not everybody can deploy to a like extreme weather zone or a war zone or do FOIA requests to take six months, you know, so I hope they focus on that.
- [15:43]
Ad Tech God
You make a, make a really good point that the growth of social media, the ease of entry for anyone to be able to create a very simple, you know, website and start publishing content and then utilizing their audience to monetize is, is literally what I did. So being able to, you know, build the audience, generate the content, distribute that content and monetize is really what we do. But you're right, the journalism piece, right? Let's forget about the articles, the opinion pieces, the newsletters, the conversations. The journalism piece I can see getting drowned out because of strong biases. If there's a particular news source that I necessarily don't agree with or doesn't have the same views as I do politically. I don't visit that site to look at the weather and I don't look at that site to look at the report. I go to the one that I'm confident in for other news types. So I could see that playing a role.
- [16:36]
Vanessa Otero
Yeah, and we all have the same finite attention. Like our information sources expanded greatly. We each still have the 24 hours in the day and the time we set aside to consume that content.
- [16:47]
Ad Tech God
Right. And even, even content consumption has changed. I did a lot of research before I started doing this with Aerie. And one of the big parts is that, you know, different generations consume content differently. The attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. If you look at the, you know, 18 to 25, they consume content very differently than 26 to, you know, 40 videos in audio is in really written is, is very short attention span, headline, couple lines of the article, they get an idea and they move on. So it'll be interesting to see how those biases roll into different types of content, including podcasts and newsletters and one off websites.
- [17:24]
Vanessa Otero
It's really easy to like turn up the bias in video and audio content just because of the format. The reason I say that is like, if you like, look at our chart when you want to find the stuff that's like in the, in the bottom corners, like most biased, least reliable, you find more of it on podcasts and YouTube.
- [17:45]
Ad Tech God
How do you work with advertisers? So this is a podcast about ad tech and advertisers. How does your company work with advertisers? What do you provide them in terms of solutions or insights?
- [17:56]
Vanessa Otero
We provide our data to advertisers, brands and agencies primarily and primarily via ad tech platforms, you know, DSPs, SSPs, to help them identify new sources that they'd want to advertise in. And it's all about getting ad dollars back to reliable news. Over the last 10ish years, the pendulum has really swung away from advertisers investing in news. The funny story about like getting into the advertising industry itself, like let alone ad tech. I didn't have any background in the advertising industry and somebody saw what I was doing and they said, you know, that data that you have on what's reliable and biased that could really help with brand safety. And I was like, oh cool, what's, what's brand safety? And Right, what a weird phrase. And they had to sort of explain the entire ad industry to me. But the idea that you don't want your ad showing up next to yucky content on the Internet, you know, violence or sexually explicit content. And I said, oh, so this could help them avoid like misleading content or really highly polarizing. Yes. And I thought, okay, great. So as soon as I started going to brands and agencies saying, hey, we can help you avoid this kind of unsavory stuff, they're like, oh, that's nice, but that's not really a problem for us because we just don't advertise in news anymore. And I was like, what?
- [19:24]
Ad Tech God
Yeah, that's not good either.
- [19:26]
Vanessa Otero
Advertising News is like 25 to 33% of the content on the Internet, on TV, on podcasts, like no matter the format, it's like a big chunk of the content. What do you mean you don't advertise there? And then I started to see the damage that that was really doing. They're like, oh, well, we have these brand safety tools and they just, you know, we just block the keywords or the sites. And I didn't think as an outsider that seemed really wrong and damaging. And it is. Look what's happening to, to news outlets. And it just so happens that like you should advertise in news because journalism is like a pillar of democracy. So like that's the pro democracy case for advertising in news happens to be that if you advertise in high quality news, it's better for the brand. Like the metrics are just much better on campaigns that run in news in high quality news than campaigns that do not. Unfortunately, there's a lot more good news content out there than junk news. Content is not necessarily intuitive because like the misleading, highly biased, very polarizing content is very loud and it has a huge effect on our society. It makes it seem like everything is on fire and falling apart and it is highly responsible for that. However, the scale of the advertising opportunities is overwhelmingly in the good news content.
- [20:55]
Ad Tech God
It's funny you mentioned something about keyword blocking. I just ran a poll about that on LinkedIn and how it's pretty inaccurate. I think the example I used was, know if you block the word shoot, do you accidentally block basketball content? In your case, there are people who are blocking entire news outlets, which I get that they may have some sort of perception or, or opinion on that news outlet. But even keyword blocking is flawed. And that list can be really, really wide and just eliminate so much good inventory and high performing inventory rather than really scoping it and going deep into, okay, what is the analysis of these keywords? What's the tone analysis of these keywords, what is this word? Followed by if there's basketball or NBA or professional athlete's name or team, like, let it slide because then, you know they're talking about a basketball game. Content. But it's pretty incredible that even till today, the keyword blocking is still a strategy done rather than a more detailed analysis of the content to decide where your budgets go.
- [21:59]
Vanessa Otero
Yeah, and I think it's a lot of inertia. Like, once a practice gets put into place, it's hard to extract it. People know it's a problem, but in order to solve it and put something new in place, just take some effort. And advertising professionals are very busy. There's a lot of things to think about. So making it easy is one of our big focuses. If it's not easy to do, we can have been talking about this problem for the last five years. I think Suzanne Veronica wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about this exact keyword issue shot in 2019. That's almost six years ago, you know.
- [22:35]
Ad Tech God
Yeah, still a problem. Yeah, still happening. It's pretty incredible. So, Vanessa, I really enjoyed having you with me today. I have one last question for you. What's a viewpoint that you have about the ad tech industry that you think most people would disagree on that the.
- [22:53]
Vanessa Otero
Sentiment analysis doesn't matter very much. I'll expand just a little bit on it, especially when it comes to news. News is mostly negative and it's important that it's negative. We need to know what's not working and, like, what things are going wrong. It's like a survival mechanism. Like this negativity bias is not a bad thing. And there's this assumption that you want to advertise just around positive things and not around negative things because of, like, how people feel. But it's not well supported by data. And folks pay a lot of attention to negative stuff. I mean, look at like engagement on social media. Most of it is like highly, highly negative. But people don't question their, like, the performance of the ad investments does so well. Right. So the application of sentiment to say, like, oh, let's add sentiment to news, and we'll only advertise around positive stories about the war. Like, that doesn't even make any sense. Like, it's important to read about the war and yes, the war is negative. We need to know about it. People are paying attention to that extremely, extremely important content. And when your ad is around there, they notice it.
- [24:12]
Ad Tech God
I don't even know what to say because that was a great perspective. I loved it. Thank you for sharing that.
- [24:17]
Vanessa Otero
I'm trying not to be contrarian on everything just for the sake of it, but that one I do feel strongly about.
- [24:21]
Ad Tech God
You know what, I'm always shocked by the answers people give me. That one was really good. I had someone tell me, you know, I don't know why everybody hates Google and I thought that was an interesting response. But thank you again for being here and thanks again for your time today.
- [24:34]
Vanessa Otero
My pleasure. I really appreciate you having me on.
- [24:36]
Ad Tech God
Of course. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates so follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.