The connection between information and promoting is strained, to say the least. And it’s solely getting worse, as misinformation proliferates and AI-generated writing hits the mainstream.
Towards that backdrop, Advert Fontes Media, which supplies information high quality and bias rankings for advertisers, introduced a $4.2 million Collection A spherical on Wednesday, bringing the corporate’s complete funding to simply over $6 million because it was based in 2018.
Advert Fontes plans to spend its newfound capital on hiring media bias researchers and enhancing its media score instruments for foreign-language content material, together with constructing on its current Spanish language capabilities.
It plans to broaden into new geos beginning with India and Brazil, each of which characterize massive information markets. Brazil particularly has a widespread misinformation downside, in accordance with firm CEO Vanessa Otero.
Advert Fontes may even start to make use of AI modeling to scale its means to price media high quality throughout a wider vary of on-line content material, Otero stated.
Extra scale by means of AI
At present, Advert Fontes’ evaluation course of is essentially handbook.
Groups of three media analysts whose views characterize completely different components of the political spectrum analyze articles one after the other for bias, stated Brad Berens, head of insights.
The eventual objective, Otero stated, is to make use of the roughly 60,000 items of content material that Advert Fontes has manually ranked over the previous 5 years to coach an AI mannequin and apply these insights at scale.
“With out that coaching information set,” she stated, “you possibly can’t create an correct AI mannequin to price articles.”
The remainder of the funding will go to hiring information science and engineering assist.
The corporate, which has 15 full-time staff and 65 part-time media analysts, has already attracted business veterans to its govt management crew.
Former Financial institution of America marketer Lou Paskalis joined in April as chief technique officer. And Berens, who had been on the Advert Fontes board since 2018, took on the insights chief position final month.
Considered one of Berens’ high priorities shall be to conduct analysis into whether or not promoting assist for information content material has a destructive influence on model notion.
He’ll begin by rolling out a joint research with client insights firm CivicScience this summer season to research whether or not advertisements positioned on information websites trigger customers to alter their spending habits.
“Entrepreneurs need information to know if issues about model security in information are overblown,” Otero stated.
Investor roll name
Aion Ventures led the Advert Fontes funding spherical, with participation from New Neighborhood Transformation Fund – Denver (NCTF-D).
Based on Troy Root, a managing accomplice at Aion Ventures, the agency was drawn to the corporate’s effort to create a media literacy curriculum for college kids and its mission of funneling advert {dollars} away from misinformation and towards high quality journalism.
The latter is very necessary within the run-up to subsequent November’s US elections.
That mission likewise resonates with NCTF-D, a fund that gives monetary backing for firms with numerous management.
A handful of angel buyers additionally contributed to the spherical, together with advert tech vets Will Luttrell, CTO of The Brandtech Group and co-founder of IAS, and Scott Cunningham, a founding father of IAB Tech Lab, who consults with the Native Media Consortium.
Though now may seem to be a troublesome time to be courting buyers given persistent worries a couple of doable recession, Otero was unfazed. Elevating capital has by no means been simple as a lady founder, she stated.
“I don’t suppose the macroeconomic surroundings was a lot of an element – all of it appeared the identical to me,” she stated. “However the [number of] people who’ve stepped up all through the years and who consider in our mission has compounded over time.”
