Transcript
Jeremy Bloom: Oh, hello, Vanessa.
Vanessa Otero: Oh, hello, Jeremy.
Jeremy Bloom: How are you?
Vanessa Otero: Fantastic. It's great to see you.
Jeremy Bloom: It's great to see you. Thank you for doing this so early. I just want to call out the fact that we both agreed to do this abnormally early, but that's what busy entrepreneurs have to do. So thank you.
Jeremy Bloom: Thank you for being you.
Vanessa Otero: problem. Happy to be here. It's really not that early for normal people.
Jeremy Bloom: It's early. It's really, really early.
Vanessa Otero: For us non-morning people.
Jeremy Bloom: Right, exactly. So Vanessa Otero, why don't you tell me who you are? I happen to know that you are the founder and CEO of AdFontis Media. I appreciate very much what you and your team do.
Jeremy Bloom: But why don't you tell our listeners, our audience, what you have been building for the past, I believe, seven years. Is that right?
Vanessa Otero: Yeah, it was our seven-year anniversary just couple of days ago, and time flies.
Jeremy Bloom: Nice.
Vanessa Otero: An entrepreneur early on told me, you overestimate what you can do in one year, but you underestimate what you can do in five years or seven years. That's true. We rate the news and news-like information sources for reliability and political bias.
Vanessa Otero: Big topic, our information ecosystem these days is, you know, it's an brave new world, to say the least. So we provide that information to anyone who's a stakeholder in the media ecosystem, which is pretty much everyone, you know, consumers, educators, ad tech companies, brands, agencies, and ad tech platforms specifically in this space.
Vanessa Otero: But also, you know, publishers, researchers. Yeah, everyone needs news rating. So me and my team, that's what we do.
Jeremy Bloom: Amazing. So before founding AdFontis Media, was there a moment or an experience in your career that made you realize the critical need for unbiased, balanced information today's actual world that we are living in?
Vanessa Otero: Yes, and not just the need for it, but the need to bridge the gaps between folks who are consuming it and folks who are not. There was definitely a moment in 2016, was talking to an acquaintance about politics on Facebook, and that was just the hot thing back then. It's back in vogue now.
Vanessa Otero: talking about politics and Facebook, you can do that again. But I talked to this person in 2012, you know, different political views, we had like a normal conversation, and we could, you know, come to agreement on something.
Vanessa Otero: And then we had another conversation in 2016. And it was just, you know, it was really different. Like, he had been, he had gone sort of down a rabbit hole into, you know, memes and tropes and just like,
Vanessa Otero: these filter bubbles, these bespoke realities, that had really started to become obvious. It was like, we just inhabited different informational universes.
Vanessa Otero: And so I saw that in lots of folks online. And, know, I realized that Just having like one to one conversations about politics on social media was not effective anymore.
Vanessa Otero: And if it had ever been.
Jeremy Bloom: Right.
Vanessa Otero: So you know, didn't I don't want to waste my time. want to be as effective as possible. And starting with just a baseline of what news sources are reliable, minimally biased, which ones are a little left and right, which is fine, which ones are opinion, which is fine, but which ones are way out there, extreme or just containing misleading information, inaccurate information. It was really important to distinguish between those
Vanessa Otero: as a baseline. And so we're still just doing that work. The filter bubbles still exist and there's a lot more to do there.
Jeremy Bloom: So as a founder, as a CEO, what steps do you take to create an inclusive environment within AdFontas? Because you talked about left, you talked about center, you talked about right.
Vanessa Otero: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Bloom: Obviously, you're going to have different kinds of people and cultures and opinions at your company.
Vanessa Otero: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Bloom: We'd love to hear about what you do to lasso an inclusive environment at your company.
Vanessa Otero: Since the very beginning, when it was just me, when I just started, I made the media bias chart by myself and folks would say, well, you're biased. And I was like, well, that's true.
Vanessa Otero: So how do I make this less biased? And the only way we are all biased as individuals. So for us to rate the news for political bias It was really important to our audience, to anybody, to have any hope of credibility to mitigate it best as possible, which meant making sure that we had diversity, specifically diversity of political position.
Vanessa Otero: So it is baked into our whole process. Most job interviews do not ask you about your political leanings. This is like a required question for us.
Vanessa Otero: Like we've recruited, like it's on our entry, like applications, please fill out. Like, you know, we have quite a few forums about like people self-evaluating left, right, and center. And then my favorite question to ask when I interview our analysts is, you know, you put yourself as right-leaning or left-leaning or liberal or conservative.
Vanessa Otero: What makes you proud of calling yourself that? And people will tell them, they tell you the best things about themselves. They don't tell you the worst things about themselves, the things that the other side thinks about them.
Vanessa Otero: So we have those, like that's built in from the very beginning. Folks have to work with each other left, right, and center on every analyst shift.
Jeremy Bloom: Really?
Vanessa Otero: people who disagree with you. And the other forms of diversity are inherently also important to our credibility to make sure that we have, that our analyst core group reflects what America looks like, far as like gender, age, race, and other like personal characteristics and experiences. So we are really on top of that.
Jeremy Bloom: So starting a venture focused on media literacy. That's not something that a lot of people do. There are risks that one would take, especially where you were previously in your career.
Vanessa Otero: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Bloom: So how did that shape your journey? What kind of risks? What kind of just rolling up your sleeves kinds of things did you do?
Vanessa Otero: Yeah, it was a big risk. I was a patent lawyer before it. That was a good job. I mean, liked it too.
Jeremy Bloom: That was a great job.
Vanessa Otero: I didn't leave because I hated I really enjoyed it. And it paid well. And so I started this company in media literacy. And I will tell you, my first pitch decks at the end, was like, all right, and then we'll make money. People will pay us for news ratings.
Vanessa Otero: And And everyone I pitched it to was like, well, who and how? And I was like, I don't know, but somebody will pay for news ratings. So I didn't really, it's hard to monetize things that are good for the world.
Vanessa Otero: That's a challenge. You have to be really creative about doing that.
Jeremy Bloom: You have be creative for sure. Yes.
Vanessa Otero: And you have to keep that as a focus. How can we make this profitable, lucrative, sustainable so we can keep doing it, so we can fund the work that we do?
Vanessa Otero: So the big risk was leaving my job. I left at the end of 2020, my practice full-time. because we had a first couple of commercial deals and raised a little bit of money equity crowdfunding.
Vanessa Otero: I left my job and I told my team, all right, we have three months of runway, see what we can do. If not, we go back to our jobs, all of us. And here we are. It's been five years since then. Four, four and a half.
Jeremy Bloom: Amazing. Amazing. What are some core principles that you believe should guide how we consume and evaluate information?
Jeremy Bloom: And how do you communicate these same kind of principles to your company and to your clients and to your investors?
Vanessa Otero: Well, the most important thing people should look for in the information they consume is evidence. Evidence for the claims. Evidence for the facts. And that seems like, oh, yeah, of course you would look for the evidence.
Jeremy Bloom: I thrilled.
Vanessa Otero: That is not how we evaluate information. I have an acronym for communicating how people typically evaluate information. And it's RELI, R-E-L-I.
Vanessa Otero: So there's four things. There's R for reputation, E for evidence, L for likelihood, and I for incentives. And some of those are better than others to use as heuristics for what to actually rely on.
Vanessa Otero: Evidence is the best one. The second letter. Likelihood is the second best one. But mostly people they lean on are for reputation.
Vanessa Otero: Like, do I trust this person? You know, this conversation about authenticity. They're like, if I trust and like this person, will believe them. That is actually a terrible way to go about evaluating whether you should believe them. People like, oh, an unscripted conversation with a person like me.
Vanessa Otero: Maybe that person is not smart, not kind. There's a lot of reasons you shouldn't believe.
Vanessa Otero: The things that they're saying lack evidence. So really leaning on evidence is what we need to train ourselves to do as media consumers.
Jeremy Bloom: So what kind of advice do you have for aspiring change makers and knowing how passionate you are about mentorship, giving back, being truthful, and just making connections and lifting people up and telling truth.
Jeremy Bloom: We'd love to hear your guidance that you can give to our audience when it comes to just advice that you've gone through, through your journey that can help others that are trying to make some change.
Vanessa Otero: Absolutely. The first piece of advice would be look for the ways that you need to be the leader in the system and push back against like what's what exists there.
Vanessa Otero: You know, when you're trying to make change in a field. There are some things that are established that you need to learn about. And there's like constraints within a system. And lot of those constraints you have to work within.
Vanessa Otero: But there are certain things that you'll butt up against that you're like, no, I need to push back against this. This is the thing I'm trying to change, you know, for, me in our company, it was the notions of brand safety and avoidance of news.
Vanessa Otero: Pushing back against that is really, really important. And people want to follow your lead. So figure out where you need to lead. Second, about advice, is only take advice from people who have exactly what you want in the area that you want the advice.
Vanessa Otero: because a lot of people give advice about stuff. Ask yourself, like, do I want what that person has in that particular area? like about fitness, about relationships, about money, about the company, like look for exactly the folks who are where you want to be and prize their advice the most.
Vanessa Otero: And then third piece of advice is just don't quit. I mean, Most of this is just getting it out and showing up and like being super stubborn and not going away. Even when it's really hard.
Jeremy Bloom: I promise you, these were three amazing pieces of guidance and advice that I appreciate just as a friend. And so I agree with number two and number three hit home.
Jeremy Bloom: Number two specifically because everyone wants to give penny for their thoughts, so to speak.
Vanessa Otero: Hmm.
Jeremy Bloom: And then number three, just stick with it. Just do it. It's going to suck some days, but you just got to go with it and trust your gut.
Vanessa Otero: Yep.
Jeremy Bloom: So this has been fantastic. We appreciate you. Thank you so much, Vanessa.
Vanessa Otero: I appreciate you. Thank you so much, Jeremy.
Jeremy Bloom: Cool. Thanks, everybody. Take care.
