The relationship between news and advertising is strained, to say the least. And it’s only getting worse, as misinformation proliferates and AI-generated writing hits the mainstream.
Against that backdrop, Ad Fontes Media, which provides news quality and bias ratings for advertisers, announced a $4.2 million Series A round on Wednesday, bringing the company’s total funding to just over $6 million since it was founded in 2018.
Ad Fontes plans to spend its newfound capital on hiring media bias researchers and enhancing its media rating tools for foreign-language content, including building on its existing Spanish language capabilities.
It plans to expand into new geos starting with India and Brazil, both of which represent large news markets. Brazil in particular has a widespread misinformation problem, according to company CEO Vanessa Otero.
Ad Fontes will also begin to use AI modeling to scale its ability to rate media quality across a wider range of online content, Otero said.
More scale through AI
Currently, Ad Fontes’ analysis process is largely manual.
Teams of three media analysts whose views represent different parts of the political spectrum analyze articles one by one for bias, said Brad Berens, head of insights.
The eventual goal, Otero said, is to use the roughly 60,000 pieces of content that Ad Fontes has manually ranked over the past five years to train an AI model and apply those insights at scale.
“Without that training data set,” she said, “you can’t create an accurate AI model to rate articles.”
The rest of the funding will go to hiring data science and engineering support.
The company, which has 15 full-time employees and 65 part-time media analysts, has already attracted industry veterans to its executive leadership team.
Former Bank of America marketer Lou Paskalis joined in April as chief strategy officer. And Berens, who had been on the Ad Fontes board since 2018, took on the insights chief role last month.
One of Berens’ top priorities will be to conduct research into whether advertising support for news content has a negative impact on brand perception.
He’ll start by rolling out a joint study with consumer insights company CivicScience this summer to investigate whether ads placed on news sites cause consumers to change their spending habits.
“Marketers want data to understand if concerns about brand safety in news are overblown,” Otero said.
Investor roll call
Aion Ventures led the Ad Fontes funding round, with participation from New Community Transformation Fund – Denver (NCTF-D).
According to Troy Root, a managing partner at Aion Ventures, the firm was drawn to the company’s effort to create a media literacy curriculum for students and its mission of funneling ad dollars away from misinformation and toward quality journalism.
The latter is especially important in the run-up to next November’s US elections.
That mission likewise resonates with NCTF-D, a fund that provides financial backing for companies with diverse leadership.
A handful of angel investors also contributed to the round, including ad tech vets Will Luttrell, CTO of The Brandtech Group and co-founder of IAS, and Scott Cunningham, a founder of IAB Tech Lab, who consults with the Local Media Consortium.
Although now might seem like a tough time to be courting investors given persistent worries about a possible recession, Otero was unfazed. Raising capital has never been easy as a woman founder, she said.
“I don’t think the macroeconomic environment was much of a factor – it all appeared the same to me,” she said. “But the [number of] folks who have stepped up throughout the years and who believe in our mission has compounded over time.”
