Ad Fontes Media execs appear on the ‘In Reality’ podcast

Brand Safety and Online Advertising: How to Support High-Quality Journalism

Ad Fontes Media execs appear on the ‘In Reality’ podcast

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In the past few decades, the advertising industry  has placed an emphasis on brand safety. Brands don’t want their ads to appear next to misleading or polarizing content online, but they often do, and the brands sometimes don’t even know it.

How does this happen, and what’s the solution? Ad Fontes Media founder/CEO Vanessa Otero and Chief Strategy Officer Lou Paskalis recently discussed this issue on “In Reality,” a podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. The episode was hosted by Eric Schurenberg, executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Paskalis explained that the process of ad buying has changed from a transaction between humans to programmatic auctions fueled by technology, with billions of transactions completed in a millisecond. In the end, advertisers don’t actually know where their digital ads are going to appear.

Advertisers concerned about brand safety try to use tactics such as keyword blockers to control what types of content their ads are supporting. But some websites, such as made for advertising sites (also known as MFAs), have gotten around that by borrowing information from other sources and rewriting the content without any of the offending keywords that brands avoid.

In programmatic auctions, high-quality journalism with in-depth reporting is sold at a premium while space on lower-quality MFA sites is sold at a discount.

“That MFA site is going to win every time in a programmatic auction,” Pasklais said. “We’re actually penalizing those sites that actually have Pulitzers lying around their offices like paperweights, and favoring other sites where the content is either borrowed, perhaps plagiarized, sanitized, and might even be written by software as opposed to humans.”

Otero said this cycle has led to high-quality journalism losing ad dollars altogether, because many big brands have decided not to advertise in news at all. They feel it’s too risky. 

“It’s a toxic cocktail which really disenfranchises the Fourth Estate in our country and no longer allows them to perform the function that the Constitution of the United States uniquely outlines for them,” Paskalis said. “The only profession called out in our Constitution is journalism and its role to keep politicians in check.”

Learn more about the ad tech industry and how data from Ad Fontes Media can help advertisers support high-quality journalism in this episode of “In Reality.”

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