A study conducted with CivicScience about the characteristics of High Quality News consumers shows the truth is brand safe and brand smart for advertisers.

These days, it’s typical for brands and their media agencies to hear that it’s time for them to reinvest in advertising within the news. The problem with most of these conversations is that they are finger-wagging, eat-your-vegetables, “you have to use your ad dollars to save democracy!” exercises.

Saving democracy is not the job of brands and agencies: their job is to build unaided awareness for their products to drive growth.

Here at Ad Fontes Media, we are deeply committed to the preservation of democracy. However, we also want to have an additional conversation: advertising within High Quality News builds brands and drives growth with no risk and with a high Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).

There’s a key distinction in that last paragraph that you might have skipped over: I referred to High Quality News, not just News in general. If you’re familiar with our iconic Media Bias Chart®, then you’ll recognize High Quality News as the sources inside the green box at the top-center of the chart. This is the News that is both highly reliable and highly accurate.

Lumping all News together does not serve anyone’s interests: citizens, teachers, or advertisers.

For advertisers, focusing on High Quality News reveals that the truth is both brand safe and brand smart.

In our new study, “The Advertising Value of High Quality News,” which we conducted with our friends at CivicScience, we paint a portrait of the High Quality News consumer.

We found that High Quality News consumers are healthier, wealthier, more educated, and happier than their counterparts who consume Low Quality News (the sources in the orange and red boxes on the Media Bias Chart). High Quality News consumers are also more likely to own iPhones than Android phones, which is a common proxy that marketers use to describe consumers with disposable income.

In other words, the compelling reason for brands and agencies to advertise within High Quality News is that their best customers are there.

Plus, at a moment when High Quality News organizations are starved for advertising dollars (for example, see this snippet from PwC research), the inventory available to advertisers in High Quality News is aggressively priced.

Saving democracy is also a nice bonus.

“The Advertising Value of High Quality News” is only our first study. Watch the Research page on our website for more later this summer.

Brad Berens, Ph.D., is a futurist, researcher, and popular keynote speaker with an enabling perspective on digital user adoption trends. He is a leading digital media executive who has deep connections and a clear understanding of what advertisers, media properties, agencies and startups need from the fast-changing world of interactive technologies. Currently, Brad is Head of Insights at Ad Fonts Media, Strategic Advisor and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg, and Principal at Big Digital Idea Consulting, a boutique digital strategy practice that connects companies, technologies, people and ideas with wide-ranging expertise that includes thought leadership strategy, ad-tech, ed-tech, mobile, innovation, events and event strategy. He is writing a book about Shakespeare as a business genius, serves on a number of boards, and publishes the free Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch newsletter that you can find on both Substack and LinkedIn, and you can learn more about him at his website: bradberens.com.