Ad Fontes Media Teams with The Trade Desk to Bring Ad Dollars to Quality Journalism

By MTS Staff Writer On Feb 21, 2024

The direct integration of Ad Fontes Media’s data into The Trade Desk is the first in the new contextual API on the new Kokai platform’s partner portal.

Ad Fontes Media, a tech company that rates the news for bias and reliability, is announcing a new service that will allow advertisers to direct billions in advertising spending towards quality news journalism and tap into the significant unduplicated reach and higher ROAS that the news category delivers.

“The Trade Desk believes in the power of trusted journalism and the role of advertising in funding it.”

— Samantha Jacobson, Chief Strategy Officer, The Trade Desk

On Tuesday, Ad Fontes Media announced the integration of its ratings data with online ad giant The Trade Desk’s (Nasdaq: TTD) programmatic buying technology. Ad Fontes’ data allows advertisers to screen out partisan, AI-generated, or clickbait websites in real-time and direct their ad spending toward sites performing vital journalism in the public interest.

Ad Fontes Media, publisher of the Media Bias Chart^®, is a news rating data company that uses human analysts paired with AI technology to rate over 10,000 news websites, TV shows, YouTube channels, and podcasts on bias and reliability.

This data gives advertisers the ability to efficiently reach audiences engaged with quality news at a time when consumer and societal demand for reliable news is higher than ever.

Marketing Technology News: Optimove NFL Betting Trend Data Reveals Volume of Bets Increase During Playoffs, Average Bet Amount Declines

Vanessa Otero, Founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media, believes making its data available on The Trade Desk could initiate a turning point in the battle to fund journalism. “The Trade Desk has always pioneered how digital advertising works with a mission-driven focus on making the open web better for people and publishers. One of the pillars of making the internet better is making good journalism a profitable endeavor for more publishers, and no company is in a more powerful position to create that change than The Trade Desk.”

The Trade Desk is an advertising technology company that provides a self-service, cloud-based platform through which ad buyers can create, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across ad formats and channels. Integrations with major data, inventory, and publisher partners ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities. The integration of Ad Fontes data means that advertisers can target the most highly reliable and minimally biased journalism publishers at the local, national, and international levels.

“The Trade Desk believes in the power of trusted journalism and the role of advertising in funding it,” said Samantha Jacobson, Chief Strategy Officer, The Trade Desk. “We are pleased that our customers will now have access to Ad Fontes’ media ratings data so that they can have as much confidence as possible that they are advertising against premium journalism content.”

Due to the twin factors of brand safety concerns and the proliferation of low-quality internet content in the last decade, brands have not had easy ways to reliably identify high-quality journalism and transact on it at scale and the speed of programmatic media. Though high-quality news content consistently delivers high ROAS, it has been easier as of late for brands just to block news and advertise elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this practice has diverted advertiser budgets toward low-quality sites, including to made-for-advertising sites having clickbait headlines and increasingly, AI-generated content, leading to wasted ad dollars and the demonetization of news.

Ad Fontes’ integration with The Trade Desk aligns the business opportunity of news advertising and social imperative with ease.

“I know from over three decades as a media buyer that the most valuable audiences are in news,” said Lou Paskalis, Chief Strategy Officer of Ad Fontes Media. “Because of short-sighted thinking and over-correction around brand safety and suitability in news, it’s been an under-invested category for the last eight to ten years, which means there is unduplicated reach to be gained there now. In search of ease and scale, marketers have bought low-quality inventory instead of news, much to their detriment. Now, they don’t have to choose between high-quality news and scale.”

Ad Fontes Media is the first new data provider to build a direct integration via The Trade Desk’s new contextual API on the new Kokai platform’s partner portal. Users can select segments for reliable and minimally biased news inventory at both the domain and app level and the article level directly in The Trade Desk’s UI. Ad Fontes, which rates published internet news content in substantially real-time using its human/AI blended ratings technology, allows advertisers to target news content with great precision, even differentiating the highest-quality journalism on a particular site from more opinionated and polarizing articles on the same site. At the same time, as brands run ad campaigns across open web inventory, they can proactively use Ad Fontes segments to weed out content that Ad Fontes has classified as highly polarizing, made-for-advertising, fake, and/or AI generated according to its robust methodology.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Allison Breeding, CMO at Apptio, an IBM company