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OhHello - Vanessa Otero
28 Plays1 month ago
OhHello!
It's episode 94 -- Welcome Vanessa Otero, founder & CEO of Ad Fontes Media, the force behind the viral Media Bias Chart! Vanessa is a passion fueled change-agent who has been walking the walk, since day 1, as her company's vision is more important than ever. In fact, just yesterday, at the Association of National Advertisers Media Summit, Lou Paskalis + The Trade Desk's Jeff Green talked about the integration and importance of advertisers NOT avoiding hashtag#news content b/c of great integrations like what Ad Fontes has been building.
(This pod was initially scheduled for later in the month, but I've also gotten to know Vanessa over the past couple years and wanna help get her some more ⛽⛽⛽⛽ for her 🔥 because this is an important mission)
She left a successful law career to fix the broken way we consume news. Today, her company rates media for reliability and bias... and her POV on truth, leadership, and mentorship is 🔥
💥 Highlights:
🧠 “We’re all biased... but systems don’t have to be”
🔍 She created a hiring process that builds in ideological diversity
📈 Her mentorship rule: Only take advice from people who have exactly what you want
💡 And the big one: Don’t quit. Be the one who stays in the game
In a biased and misleading news landscape, it's beyond essential to know where your information and sources are coming from hashtag#bias hashtag#politics hashtag#media
And with honest, unfiltered, and raw 1:1 mentorship sessions that businesses are providing for their teams via OhHello.ai 👋, it's more important than ever to have access to real, empathetic, leaders like Vanessa.
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Early Morning Greetings
00:00:05
Jeremy Bloom
Oh, hello, Vanessa.
00:00:08
Vanessa Otero
Oh, hello, Jeremy.
00:00:10
Jeremy Bloom
How are you?
00:00:11
Vanessa Otero
Fantastic. It's great to see you.
00:00:13
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.
00:00:24
Jeremy Bloom
Thank you for being you.
00:00:25
Vanessa Otero
problem. Happy to be here. It's really not that early for normal people.
00:00:29
Jeremy Bloom
It's early. It's really, really early.
00:00:30
Vanessa Otero
For us non-morning people.
00:00:32
Jeremy Bloom
Right, exactly.
Meet Vanessa Otero: Founder of AdFontis Media
00:00:33
Jeremy Bloom
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.
00:00:46
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?
00:00:51
Vanessa Otero
Yeah, it was our seven-year anniversary just couple of days ago, and time flies.
00:00:52
Jeremy Bloom
Nice.
00:00:57
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.
00:01:15
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.
00:01:39
Vanessa Otero
But also, you know, publishers, researchers. Yeah, everyone needs news rating. So me and my team, that's what we do.
The 2016 Facebook Conversation on Media Polarization
00:01:48
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?
00:02:03
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.
00:02:24
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.
00:02:36
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,
00:02:50
Vanessa Otero
these filter bubbles, these bespoke realities, that had really started to become obvious. It was like, we just inhabited different informational universes.
00:03:01
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.
00:03:15
Vanessa Otero
And if it had ever been.
00:03:16
Jeremy Bloom
Right.
00:03:17
Vanessa Otero
So you know, didn't I don't want to waste my time. want to be as effective as possible.
Combating Filter Bubbles with Reliable News
00:03:24
Vanessa Otero
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
00:03:45
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.
00:03:55
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.
00:04:04
Vanessa Otero
Mm-hmm.
00:04:05
Jeremy Bloom
Obviously, you're going to have different kinds of people and cultures and opinions at your company.
00:04:11
Vanessa Otero
Mm-hmm.
00:04:12
Jeremy Bloom
We'd love to hear about what you do to lasso an inclusive environment at your company.
00:04:18
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.
00:04:29
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.
00:04:55
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.
00:05:05
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.
00:05:23
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.
00:05:37
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.
00:05:53
Jeremy Bloom
Really?
00:05:54
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.
00:06:21
Jeremy Bloom
So starting a venture focused on media literacy.
From Patent Lawyer to Media Entrepreneur
00:06:25
Jeremy Bloom
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.
00:06:30
Vanessa Otero
Mm-hmm.
00:06:33
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?
00:06:42
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.
00:06:47
Jeremy Bloom
That was a great job.
00:06:49
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.
00:07:04
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.
00:07:19
Vanessa Otero
That's a challenge. You have to be really creative about doing that.
00:07:23
Jeremy Bloom
You have be creative for sure. Yes.
00:07:25
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?
00:07:35
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.
00:07:50
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.
00:08:01
Jeremy Bloom
Amazing. Amazing.
Evaluating Information with the RELI Acronym
00:08:04
Jeremy Bloom
What are some core principles that you believe should guide how we consume and evaluate information?
00:08:11
Jeremy Bloom
And how do you communicate these same kind of principles to your company and to your clients and to your investors?
00:08:23
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.
00:08:33
Jeremy Bloom
I thrilled.
00:08:34
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.
00:08:47
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.
00:09:04
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.
00:09:14
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.
00:09:32
Vanessa Otero
Maybe that person is not smart, not kind. There's a lot of reasons you shouldn't believe.
00:09:38
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.
00:09:50
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.
00:10:08
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.
Leadership Advice and the Power of Persistence
00:10:17
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.
00:10:28
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.
00:10:41
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.
00:10:58
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.
00:11:17
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.
00:11:38
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.
00:11:50
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.
00:12:00
Jeremy Bloom
Number two specifically because everyone wants to give penny for their thoughts, so to speak.
00:12:07
Vanessa Otero
Hmm.
00:12:07
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.
00:12:16
Vanessa Otero
Yep.
00:12:17
Jeremy Bloom
So this has been fantastic. We appreciate you. Thank you so much, Vanessa.
00:12:21
Vanessa Otero
I appreciate you. Thank you so much, Jeremy.
00:12:23
Jeremy Bloom
Cool. Thanks, everybody. Take care.