RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CA – At a time when misinformation, polarization and platform fragmentation dominate the media landscape, Vanessa Otero said one thing is clear: advertisers are relearning how to trust news, so long as they have the right data.
Otero, founder and chief executive of Ad Fontes Media, said her company’s mission is simple but ambitious: rate news sources for both reliability and political bias so that consumers, educators, publishers and advertisers can make better decisions.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat LA, she described that work as a foundational layer for repairing a noisy and often toxic information ecosystem.
“People want to fix the news landscape,” she said, noting the rise in misleading, false and polarizing content. “A multi-layered complex problem has to have multi-layered complex solutions… but fundamentally, what all the stakeholders need is ratings on the reliability and bias of news.”
From brand safety fears to performance opportunity
Over the past decade, many brands pulled away from news altogether, wary of appearing alongside political conflict, controversy or harmful content. That retreat contributed to a narrative that news is “unsafe” and best avoided.
Otero argues that perception is now shifting.
“It has been a really big problem over the last 10 years, but the pendulum is swinging back,” she said. Advertisers are rediscovering the performance of high-quality news as a channel, especially when they can distinguish between trustworthy reporting and toxic opinion content.
She pointed out that news delivers unduplicated audiences that many brands simply cannot reach elsewhere. These audiences, she said, have characteristics that are highly attractive to marketers: engaged, attentive and often affluent or influential.
Today, Otero says the conversation among leading marketers is less about basic brand safety and more about seizing that opportunity:
- Advanced tools can score inventory for high reliability and low bias, allowing brands to lean into quality journalism.
- Technology helps them avoid outlier content that may still cause issues, without walking away from news entirely.
“The brand safety is pretty much solved if you get back into news the right way,” she said. “Then you can take advantage of the performance aspects of it.”
Acting as a neutral “translator” between brands and news
Ad Fontes sits, as Otero describes it, in a kind of diplomatic middle ground between publishers and advertisers. The company functions as a third-party evaluator, scoring outlets across formats including text, TV, video, podcasts, newsletters, social and more on reliability and bias.
In practice, that means helping partners answer some deceptively simple questions:
- What actually counts as news versus “news-adjacent” content such as entertainment or lifestyle?
- Where is the line between straightforward reporting, political opinion and outright dehumanizing or vilifying rhetoric?
The more a piece of content is reliable, less overtly biased, and focused on current events, the more consensus there is that it truly belongs in the news category, Otero said. That clarity gives both publishers and advertisers a shared reference point.
News as a premium attention environment
As attention metrics gain prominence in media planning, Otero argues that news is naturally positioned as a “premium” environment, largely because people consume it purposefully.
“When you’re reading a news article, it’s because you care about knowing that thing,” she said. Unlike background TV or endless algorithmic scrolling, news is typically sought out with intent.
That intent translates into higher engagement and stronger attention signals, factors that many tech vendors now highlight in their own research. Otero also cited studies showing that a meaningful share of the population consists of self-described “news junkies,” including about 14% of consumers who effectively cannot be reached on other platforms. For advertisers who insist they can find their audience anywhere, those numbers tell a different story.
A case study: Back to news after eight years away
To illustrate the shift, Otero pointed to a recent case study involving a major advertiser that had stayed out of news environments for more than eight years due to concerns about political bias and brand safety.
Working with Ad Fontes ratings and their agency partners, the brand agreed to test a news-only campaign across thousands of high-quality national, international and local news sites. The results, she said, validated what Ad Fontes had long theorized:
- Lower CPMs across the campaign.
- Much lower cost per acquisition (CPA) compared with other channels.
- Strong performance while maintaining strict brand safety standards.
Crucially, the marketer also relaxed some of its traditional blocking practices. Using ratings and brand safety tools together, the brand removed seven out of ten standard category blocks it typically applied to campaigns, yet still achieved a 99% brand safety score.
“It shows that you can invest in news, have it be brand safe, and get the kind of results you want,” Otero said, adding that similar outcomes are appearing across verticals and KPI types.
For Otero, the combination of high attention, quality audiences, better pricing and robust safety controls might be the formula that finally brings news back into the mainstream of media plans, not as a risk to be managed but as an asset to be fully leveraged.
