News, Trust, and Polarization: Vanessa Otero on the Fragmented Media Era
- 4 days ago
- 60 min read
What happens when society can no longer agree on basic facts?
In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Vanessa Otero, Founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media and creator of the Media Bias Chart, to explore the growing crisis of trust, polarization, and information quality in today’s media landscape.
What began as a personal project during the 2016 election cycle has evolved into one of the most widely recognized frameworks for evaluating media bias and reliability. Today, Ad Fontes Media analyzes thousands of articles, podcasts, and news sources to help consumers, educators, advertisers, and publishers better understand the fragmented information ecosystem.
The conversation explores how audiences increasingly consume different versions of reality, why social media algorithms amplify outrage and identity over truth, and whether objective journalism is still possible in an era shaped by platforms, creators, and AI-generated content. Vanessa explains how collapsing trust in institutions, the decline of local journalism, and the economics of digital advertising have reshaped the news industry — and why high-quality reporting functions as critical societal infrastructure.
The episode covers:
• The origin of the Media Bias Chart
• Trust, misinformation, and media fragmentation
• The collapse of local journalism
• Social media algorithms and outrage economics
• Why advertisers stopped buying news
• AI-generated content and the future of journalism
• Podcasts, creators, and the changing media landscape
• Brand safety, media quality, and CTV advertising
• Whether objective journalism is still possible
At a time when trust in institutions, journalism, and even shared reality itself is being tested, Vanessa argues that the future of democracy and public discourse may depend on our ability to rebuild credible information systems. This conversation is a deep exploration of how media, technology, advertising, and AI are reshaping the way society understands truth and what happens if we fail to get it right.
Watch the full episode and join the conversation.
🔑 What We Cover💡 Key Takeaways🎯 Why This Episode Matters
Read the full transcript below.
Brett House (00:01)
Welcome back to Signal and Noise. I'm Brett House, joined by my co-host Rio Longacre. Today, we are diving into one of the most emotionally charged and culturally important subjects, arguably, in media today, and that is trust and news journalism and advertising against news. ⁓ Where people get their news, who they believe, how algorithms shape perception, and whether objective journalism is even possible anymore is a topic that I know.
Vanessa Otero, who is the CEO of Ad Fontis Media, ⁓ is joining us and is certainly passionate about this topic. ⁓ You've done a ton of work ⁓ to really lead the global conversation ⁓ around ⁓ news advertising and safety in journalism. And you're the creator of the Media Bias Chart, one of the most widely shared and
Debated frameworks for understanding political bias and reliability in modern media Yeah And you're you're ⁓ a friend of a friend of the pod. In fact, I think he's your chief strategy officer Lou Pascals He's been on a couple of times talking about the news topic and how critical it is both for yeah for our society for advertising in general and
Rio (01:00)
chart we all know and use. Correct. Yep.
We're big fans of Lou in this pod. ⁓
Vanessa (01:17)
Me too.
Brett House (01:19)
And your background is pretty interesting, Vanessa. Like you came from law rather than media and advertising, like a lot of us. ⁓ Right? And you were also an English major, which we love English majors at UCLA. Yes.
Rio (01:32)
We have lots of those in this show. It's funny. ⁓ English
Vanessa (01:34)
good.
Rio (01:35)
comparative literature, political science. Those seem to be the greatest hits here. It's funny.
Brett House (01:38)
Yeah,
so I always look for that. I'm like, my god, it seems like we attract a certain type of people or people that are involved in the industry deeply. There are a lot that came from these liberal arts majors. But you went to Denver, you got your law degree, you practiced law. I'd love to hear how you founded ⁓ Ad Fontis. What was the impetus behind it? What drove you, the passion project? ⁓ And tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
Vanessa (01:40)
Haha
Yeah, I'm happy to get into that. Excited to be here. Thank you for having me on the podcast.
Brett House (02:10)
Absolutely.
Vanessa (02:11)
Where do you want me to start? Just where I always started the media bias chart and where it all came from?
Brett House (02:15)
Yeah, yeah, well, how
about to tell the audience just a little bit about yourself? Was I accurate in how I described your background? Yeah, and sort of what brought you to today, like in terms of Ed Fontes Media?
Rio (02:21)
Did he miss anything or mischaracterize anything?
Vanessa (02:24)
No.
⁓
you know, no, thanks for laying that out. That's all, that's all correct. And it, it actually does add up to why I'm doing what I'm doing today. So I was a, patent attorney. actually worked in technology patents, ⁓ practice for six years in Boulder. And in 2016, I was about like, midway through my, it ended up being, being like a six year, stint practicing as an attorney.
In 2016, I created the first version of the media bias chart. We'll talk about that in a little bit more detail, but it went massively viral. I just did this as a hobby. I wanted to talk to my friends and family during that election. If you remember in 2016, we had a pretty contentious election and it was the height of people arguing on Facebook badly about politics and unfriending each other. Yeah.
Rio (03:15)
I quit Facebook around that time for that reason. It was so toxic.
Brett House (03:15)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly when
I jumped off of Facebook as well.
Vanessa (03:21)
A lot of people quit their friends and family during that time because of that. ⁓ the fact that one of the big drivers was the sharing of really bias and unreliable news content on Facebook and then arguing ⁓ about it. And the fact that people couldn't really tell that some of the things that they were sharing were
not only not necessarily reliable, but they were very unlikely to convince their friends and family of their point of view because they were so one-sided. And there's a difference between something being like a little bit, you know, sharing your perspective one way or the other, or being really extreme. And folks seem to be missing that nuance. So it created this infographic, went massively viral, sort of took over my life. I didn't have a big social media following before that. And then all of a sudden everyone was discussing it.
But what it's based on is the analysis of content. We don't poll the public to see like, ⁓ do you trust this? like polling, that's how things have been measured in news and media trust for a long time. Like, do you trust Fox News? Do you trust MSNBC?
Brett House (04:33)
Yeah, a
classic Harris poll or some sort of poll type survey that rates opinion and perspective. Yeah.
Vanessa (04:37)
Yeah.
And that just tells you a lot more about the audience and it does about the content. But the answer is right there in the content. So ⁓ doing the content analysis truly is a rhetorical analysis. That's what I did as a lawyer. Like you have a couple of arguments in front of you, like two sides to every argument. But one of them is not just because there's two sides doesn't mean that they're both equal. Like one side has better arguments and better facts to support their analysis. And that side is the one that wins.
And so, using rhetorical analysis to analyze the media was just something I naturally gravitated to. I was an English major. That's what English majors do, is you analyze what the words are doing in the text and how it conveys an idea. So, that is how I got into doing this. In between there, after college, I was a sales rep.
I did B2B sales for ⁓ my first job was for Xerox knocking on doors, getting kicked out of buildings, like real, real sales, real B2B sales. That was actually my preparation for being a founder because you get a lot of, you get a lot of no's.
Brett House (05:41)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, Yeah, we see that trajectory and we see a lot of trajectory of
people that that started sales reps. I think it was Joe Root at Permanent, right? He started as a sales rep and then the next the next thing in his resume was the CEO and I'm like, what what happened between sales rep and CEO? Like how did you you know, it wasn't a climbing the ladder type experience. So I find that pretty interesting that you're
Rio (05:57)
Yeah, well, we did it just to learn the business. Yeah.
But it gives you good experience.
So Vanessa, this is going to be fun. We've been looking forward to this. guys, but for me personally, we're both Colorado ad tech out here. It's a, I think a small, but really, really cool group of people out here. So it's good to get more people involved from out here, but bigger than that, this conversation was one Brett and I wanted to have with you because the media industry is going through, I mean, something I think much bigger than even business model trends transition. It's a really...
Vanessa (06:19)
Yeah, Colorado.
Rio (06:39)
completely changing, right? So we have collapsing traffic to publishers, right? We have, like, as you mentioned, massive distrust in institutions, including the news organizations themselves. We have social platforms and UGC completely reshaping how people consume information and where they get it from. And I think it's changed a lot over the last 15 years. then now AI is entering ecosystem, right? We've got AI generated content, AI slop. We've got audiences increasingly moving towards either
hyper short form like TikTok videos and shorts and shorts or listening to like three hour podcasts. It almost seems like there's nothing in the middle. It's really kind of a crazy time. And then I think this time raises some really fascinating questions like do people really want objectivity? What role do algorithms play in this polarization? Are they driving it or are they a result of it? And why are podcasts booming while a lot of traditional journalism struggles?
Or is traditional journalism maybe finding its footing after 20 years? And that's something we could talk about it. And how should advertisers think about trust in media quality in this market? Really, that's a big question. I don't think it's been solved yet, right? About brand safety and how that translates into where advertisers should want their ads to be. So you've been in the middle of this. So ⁓ again, it's a really, I think it's going to be fascinating discussion. So let's kick off the Q &A.
Vanessa (07:54)
Hmm.
Brett House (07:58)
Yeah, and it's
clearly become kind of a major cultural conversation. Maybe I'm being hyperbolic about that. What, what, and you kind of talked a little bit about that trajectory, but when you first came up with this idea, were you thinking all of these things or was it much simpler? Were you seeing a lot of the, the trends in the industry with, you know, the, news deserts, right. And the death of a lot of local newspapers and consolidation and the growth of big digital platforms that were. Yeah.
Vanessa (08:01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Rio (08:24)
Yeah, because 2016, that was already well underway, right, for sure.
Vanessa (08:25)
Yeah,
was. Yeah.
Brett House (08:27)
So were you thinking
about all of those machinations of what was happening in the impact on news or was it something far simpler than that?
Vanessa (08:34)
No, it was simpler. mean, it was really about like how reliable is the news and how far left and right. I knew that there was a fundamental need there because when I put out the chart, I was not in the media industry like I was in law. I did not know that I had to learn this much about media, advertising, and particularly ad tech. Like, come on, that is of all technology.
Brett House (08:57)
Yeah, yeah, you're like, no idea what you're
Rio (08:57)
Right?
Brett House (09:01)
getting into. ⁓
Vanessa (09:01)
fields to have to learn.
Come on. This is a, it's so dense. I, and I like dense, difficult topics. I was a patent lawyer, but like, uh, yeah, I had to, like, the, it's a trip, uh, in, it's changing. I was not thinking about all those things, but
Brett House (09:11)
Yeah.
So you were
really thinking that the balkanization here, right? The divide, yeah.
Vanessa (09:21)
Yeah, the polarization.
Yeah, like how people live in just entirely different universes of facts. That's a thing that like you can't have a discussion with somebody about like a policy, like what should we do about this policy? What direction should we go? How should we solve this intractable problem when the basic underlying like facts of the ⁓ like what's established? You don't even have a a common ⁓ version of that.
Rio (09:51)
I find that so perplexing and frustrating, right? Because you're right. depending on what, it's not just the bias, but you're getting completely different reality. I'll give you one example. My wife and I, my wife's an attorney too, by the way. She's really good at arguing. So there's certain topics we will have. I don't think I've ever wanted to argue with her.
Vanessa (09:51)
and
Brett House (10:03)
Yeah.
Vanessa (10:05)
completely.
Brett House (10:11)
I've learned that lesson pretty well. I've had a couple of good arguments with Rio's wife. ⁓
Rio (10:21)
like we'll have arguments and then like we like there's a couple of topics where we disagree on, Like Israel, Palestine thing would be an example. Like, so we'll be arguing, she'll say, well, I read this article that like Hamas is not stealing any food. Like, and she'll show me articles and say, they're stealing 10%. Like it's not even a problem. Why do you think? And I'll say, well, I have this article here where they're stealing 85%. Like, and I videos of them stealing the trucks. Like we're not even dealing with the same set of facts.
Vanessa (10:35)
Mm-hmm.
huh.
Rio (10:47)
And then we'll share articles with each other and like, okay, let's both read these. But I just think it's so wild that you have completely different universes now. do you, if a couple can't even debate, talk about issues, how can we politically decide anything? I just think it's crazy. I don't know. are your thoughts on that? Yeah, we're happily married. We will disagree on things and debate them. But I just think that exposed to me just how different the universe you can live in, right?
Vanessa (10:48)
not dealing with the same set of facts.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (11:03)
Rio is happily married, just for everybody to really understand this.
Vanessa (11:06)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Brett House (11:11)
Yeah.
Vanessa (11:11)
Yeah.
For sure. And that the phenomenon of having tens of thousands of news and information sources is a relatively new phenomenon. it only exists in the last like 12 to 14 years. Like around 2010, I guess, gosh, 16 years now, that's when smartphones, social media got really good on smartphones. That really introduced like the scroll-based feed and the like explosion of user-generated content. And before that, the 10 year,
15 year period before that was more about like going digital like ⁓ news outlets going digital so
Brett House (11:50)
Yeah, was
still professionally produced content by news organizations or content producers that were, we won't call it Hollywood economy, but it was still professionally produced versus UGC when you go back there, right?
Vanessa (11:56)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so the explosion, the mass proliferation of that many sources, ⁓ I mean, that's a thing that can cause a separate universe is because ⁓ human attention is finite. Like there are, in the United States, 330-ish million people, ⁓ know, subset of them are adults, and each one of us has like this many waking hours, and a certain ⁓ part of that you can dedicate to content consumption. And that is the finite universe of how much attention
humans in the United States can pay to ⁓ content. But the content is just disbursed and the competition for it is just very disbursed. ⁓ attracting the attention is the thing. ⁓ And so one of the best pulls for attracting attention is like identity and politics and anger and stuff like that. Anger is very engaging. So ⁓ when I put out the chart, ⁓ I kept getting the same
Brett House (12:45)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Vanessa (13:01)
People would ask for the data, they'd ask for the methodology, they'd ask for ⁓ to add more new sources, and they would complain that I was biased. that really drove that. Yeah.
Rio (13:11)
Okay, interesting.
So they would accuse you of being biased even though you and they'd want to interrogate your methodology to try to find some akin to bias in it, I'm guessing,
Vanessa (13:14)
Yeah.
Yes, but all those three things, all those things are needs, you know, there's a need for the data ⁓ because they want to know like what is this based on? Tied to that is the need for the methodology. Like ⁓ how can we trust this, especially in academic and ⁓ educational settings, research settings, which this is used a lot in high schools and colleges for media literacy cited in a lot of academic publications now. But when it first started, it was just me, biased lady by myself.
⁓ and it was not academically rigorous. So that drove the need for me to make it such where we have like all these analysts and, ⁓ like thousands and thousands of data points and whatnot, but
Brett House (14:00)
Yeah, no,
and says you manually rate about 84,000 articles and shows producing, I think, over 250,000 individual analyst ratings, right? And 4,400 news sources. So this is not just a statistically significant sample. This is a well above and beyond statistical significance sample. And then 2,700 web and print sources, 830 podcasts. You guys are going across media.
Vanessa (14:11)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Rio (14:18)
Yeah.
I'm guessing it didn't
start there, probably started something much less robust in terms of the data set you were reviewing,
Vanessa (14:29)
No!
Absolutely. ⁓ it's a weird way to put out like an MVP of that chart. It was like the MVP. And it was like so popular because people, you mentioned that it's widely debated. So what made people care about it is because it's a good combination ⁓ of simple and complex, simple and nuanced. So anyone could discuss it, whether you just have like a basic understanding.
Brett House (14:36)
Yeah.
Rio (14:40)
right?
Vanessa (15:04)
of a very cursory understanding of the news. You can say like, ⁓ Fox is right and MSNBC is left and CNN is somewhere in the middle and we can debate that ⁓ of those two. Or if you have a very advanced, ⁓ very new savvy, you could debate the relative placements of something like The Economist. are we talking about?
⁓ European liberal or we are talking about like the United States liberal definition that it like you can talk about those kinds of things. Right.
Brett House (15:36)
Yeah, yeah. Well,
Rio (15:36)
Those are
Brett House (15:38)
yeah, and just to ground people in sort of the chart, if you haven't gone to it, you can find it at app.adfontismedia.com slash chart, forward slash chart. It's on the site. But the X axis is from left to right, most extreme left to most extreme right. So I think populism on the left, populism on the right, right. And the Y axis is original fact reporting.
Right? So the, the like investigative journalism versus the, the, the very bottom is inaccurate fabricated misinformation, basically. So you've got the, you've got this way to put different, different content, different media publishers, I'm assuming even at an article level, somewhere on this spectrum. And for the whole purpose of not just altruism and trying to shed light on a problem, because we were talking about that problem of balkanization.
Rio (16:02)
versus opinions.
Vanessa (16:17)
Yes.
Brett House (16:29)
and the break, kind of the breakdown of like the traditional centrist oriented social order in the United States. That's had this downstream impact. And I think from to tie it back to advertising, its impact on news journalism, on advertisers willingness to spend against the extreme left or the extreme right of this spectrum, you know, because they're afraid to associate, just tell me if I'm wrong here, they're afraid to associate their advertising with stuff that's highly controversial. And so they took a
kind of sledgehammer approach to saying we can't be associated with that if we're targeted for GM. Yeah, exactly. And so they start blocking what is traditionally been a very, despite the decline of newspapers, it's a very strong, unduplicated audience and gives you reach with high household income. But despite all that, they said, we're fearful.
Rio (17:04)
Well, the domain blocking, the keyword blocking, right? You're referring to, yeah, they just opted out, just said, we're not going to.
Brett House (17:25)
We don't want to be associated with it. And they just blocked it out of existence, right? Programmatic had some.
Rio (17:29)
Well, this is probably why you had to learn ad tech, right? Because you had to learn
Vanessa (17:31)
This is exactly why
Rio (17:32)
why they...
Vanessa (17:32)
I had to learn ad tech and immediate advertising in the first place. So this is how we got introduced to this world. Somebody in advertising, Brad Barron's advisor for a long time, ⁓ spent a lot of time in the media and advertising industry and said, you could use this for brand safety. That would be like a really helpful tool. And I was like, what is brand safety? mean, ⁓
Brett House (17:56)
amazing because you kind of stumbled into this while there's all these use cases
and I can make money off of this modernization options right but keep talking
Vanessa (18:01)
Yeah,
it was a so he explained it to me like oh, it's you know this concept you don't want your ads next to the yucky stuff on the internet and like it you know like yeah, like you're porn and violence and I'm like, okay, so the yucky stuff that we're dealing with I guess is you know, unreliable information or very polarizing information. He's like, yeah, and so, you know
Rio (18:13)
That is a lot of yucky stuff.
Vanessa (18:27)
He made me introduction started meeting people in the advertising industry. We'd go to like brands and agencies and they're like, we like, we already have tools for, for doing that. ⁓ we actually just like, don't even buy news anymore, to be honest with you. And I was like, it's what. ⁓
Brett House (18:37)
Yeah.
Yes, that you like you like fell off your
Rio (18:42)
That's what kick out.
Brett House (18:44)
chair. You're like there's a big problem here that needs solving because
Vanessa (18:47)
I
was like, this seems like I am not a media person, but this seems like a missed opportunity because I have looked at the media content that's out there and like a third of it is news. How do you just not buy the news? Like a third of podcasts, YouTube, TV, the internet and like I as a consumer, a news reader, that's, I read a lot of it every day. And so if you're not advertising there, you're not advertising to me.
Brett House (19:02)
Yeah.
Vanessa (19:17)
It's not just me. There's a lot of people like me. that that was a thing. So I don't even think of us as like a brand safety company because to be honest, there's too much brand safety around news. Like it's ⁓ it's messing up.
Rio (19:28)
Well, yeah,
Brett House (19:29)
Yeah, that might
Rio (19:30)
people,
Brett House (19:30)
have been source of the problem originally, yeah.
Rio (19:31)
people, yeah, people don't realize this, but more than 50 % of the, the news inventory that these publishers are putting out is, does not get monetized because of these brands safety, like the checks, whether it's keyword or domain blocking, it's more than 50%. It's incredible to think these are news organizations. Keep in mind that
Brett House (19:39)
Yeah.
Vanessa (19:43)
Yes.
Rio (19:51)
have suffered through 20 brutal years. Craigslist eviscerated anywhere from 25 to 40 % of classified ad revenue, right? Then Google and Meta, and then by keeping people within their walled gardens, by using content the publishers push out, they're not pushing the traffic back to the publishers have siphoned off. I mean, there's some estimates up to $10 billion a year, right? And on top of that, AI is another thing, but then you factor in all the keyword blocking and stuff, which accelerated after 2016.
Vanessa (19:53)
You
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (20:10)
Yeah.
Rio (20:19)
When people just said, don't want to be associated with anything political. so like 50%. So it's been just been a really, so that was like another nail in the coffin for these news organizations, which I mean, we need for sure.
Vanessa (20:22)
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (20:29)
Yeah.
Vanessa (20:29)
Well, these tech
changes have not been favorable, like as you described.
Brett House (20:30)
Well, yeah. Well, and I think we are like all of those points, those all they do is they actually speed up the process of balkanization of the lack of good news investigative journalism, because when you have that decrease in revenue, right, they got to fire their journalists, right. And so journalists are out of jobs. More of the content we're seeing is just you. Yeah.
Rio (20:32)
for sure.
Vanessa (20:41)
Mm-hmm.
Yep. Yeah.
Rio (20:53)
And you got to create traffic throughout by selling outrage, right? Generating
clicks.
Vanessa (20:58)
Yep. See, this is exactly what made me care about this because I care about having high quality news. I want folks on the chart when you're laying things out as highly reliable, minimally biased, and ⁓ then the other stuff, the rest of the news landscape, just visually on the chart, the top middle is ⁓ the stuff that most people agree, that's news, the journalism is up there. In the middle is analysis and opinion and that's fine.
nothing inherently wrong with analysis and opinion, but there's just so much of it. And we want to distinguish it from the high quality news. then then below there's the things that are problematic, misleading, you false, ⁓ various gradations of them. Sure. Yeah. And it's not like, it's just not a binary like news versus opinion or real news versus fake news. It's a, it's much more of a gradient. So I care about there being more of the good stuff and people getting that information from more of the good stuff.
Brett House (21:33)
Yeah.
Rio (21:38)
Outright, disinformation, right? There's a lot of that too.
Brett House (21:47)
Yeah.
Vanessa (21:55)
And then seeing this dynamic in the ad industry, this is why I talk about this stuff all the time, why I've really started to care ⁓ about the business of news and how ⁓ it, as I started thinking more about like, you know, how do we solve this problem? It's just one of these multi, the complex multi-stakeholder problems, because how many people, you know, deal with the media industry? It's individuals, it's...
educators, it's academics, but then you get to the real heavy hitters. The publishers themselves have a lot of power. The advertisers have a lot of power in the platforms. Exactly. And government as well. So all of those stakeholders, when people are oh, people are spreading fake news, we should teach more media literacy. I'm like, this problem cannot solely be solved by teachers and librarians being like, okay, check your reading. We do help with that, but...
Brett House (22:26)
the platforms.
Yeah.
Vanessa (22:48)
What about all the adults
Brett House (22:49)
Or parents.
Vanessa (22:50)
with all the money that are like making this environment of the news industry? Like we need to this. It's an incentive problem.
Brett House (22:55)
Yeah, it's an incentive. It is an incentive problem. And Rhea, we
talk about this all the time, right? that that programmatic, traditional media did this to a degree as well, but programmatic gave publishers scale, but often at the expense of sort of pricing power and control. They weren't really selling context or editorial quality or audience trust. It was just a reach play. And we talk about a lot on the pod is how that trying to reach as many people, whether they're real people or not,
as broadly as possible across digital ecosystems for the lowest CPM possible is often the bad incentive that they're like, we just want to reach audiences. We can care less where we reach them. And guess what? There's actors that are going to come in and fill in the gaps. Yeah. Right. And you get the MFA advertisers that are grabbing impressions. get all of these kind of. But I think back to your original point, Vanessa, is that there's a systemic ⁓
Rio (23:27)
for the lowest CPMs. ⁓
We don't care less. Ultimately, what that means is you don't care less if they're real or not.
Vanessa (23:43)
Yeah.
Brett House (23:54)
profit motive behind all of this for all of these parties, especially the platforms that are gathering, amassing data, putting it behind walls, and then reselling it back to advertisers, the Googles, the medas, et cetera. That's where the power comes in, in newspapers, news organizations, we're very slow.
Vanessa (23:55)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (24:14)
to capture and authenticate their data, to leverage that data as their own moat, their strategic moat. And they were slow enough where they didn't see, you I worked at USA Today when this transformation in Gannett, when this transformation was happening. And they were deer in the headlights, so behind what was happening at like record pace in the industry, that by the time they woke up from this sort of bad dream, like their businesses were kind of stolen.
Vanessa (24:42)
Yeah. Well, and
Brett House (24:43)
That's my thesis.
Vanessa (24:43)
I think, well, yeah. And there's, um, I think there's some pretty good underlying reasons, structural reasons for that because like every folks will say, the, you know, the publishers were, were too slow to take, to take advantage of this. think of it like the journalism like this. there's think, think of, um, running a journalism business and running a media business are not exactly the same thing. So.
Brett House (25:10)
Yeah, that's a good point.
Vanessa (25:11)
When so there's journalism when we talk about the ⁓ lack of we lament the loss of journalism We mean a very specific kind we mean things like ⁓ investigative reporting to hold people that are powerful to account like the wealthy government You know religious scientific institutions, etc. ⁓
Rio (25:29)
This could be like
Ronan Farrow's reporting into the New Yorker, by the way, or something like, which is, which is just outstanding stuff like that, right?
Vanessa (25:33)
Yeah
Or even like there's that type of journalism exactly and there's like on the ground war reporting Very important. There's local news community reporting Yes, ⁓ and like telling stories about like injustices people face people who like wouldn't otherwise have a voice and struggles that ⁓ the how policies affect the
Rio (25:44)
Having correspondence on the ground. Yeah, it makes sense. Yep.
Vanessa (25:57)
people's lives and how they struggle. Like that's a kind of journalism. And I call that like most valuable journalism and VJ. And that is the thing that people are like, we need that's declining. ⁓ no, this is that's terrible. And we can see that because there's a lack of journalism, less journalism jobs, and there's news deserts and stuff like that. But what we don't lack is media. We don't like content in general. And there's like more of that.
Brett House (26:03)
Yeah.
Yeah, quite quite the
opposite. Quite the opposite.
Vanessa (26:26)
Quite the opposite.
No one is like, no offense, like, no one said that there's not enough podcasts or there's not enough YouTube channels or like there's not enough internet pages generally. mean, but what is on there? If it's not most valuable journalism, what is that made up of? It's made up of a couple of other classes. One that's very close is not, it's not most valuable journalism, but ⁓ it's news related content. So news related content can be re-reporting.
Like you rewrite it, you rewrite ⁓ something that is original and that can has its own value or whatever. You have your ⁓ opinion content, analysis content. so like all podcasts and takes and ⁓ like YouTube videos and blogs and stuff or sub stack newsletters, all that is like news related content that ⁓ doesn't, that feeds off of the original story in the first place.
Brett House (27:24)
Yeah, it's like derivative news content in a way. Yeah.
Vanessa (27:24)
But so it is,
but then you have non news content like entertainment, like sports, stuff like that. And then you have user generated content and then you have AI generated content. those things in that order described the gross margin on most valuable journalism is very low and potentially negative. And the gross margin on everything else is much, much, much higher. And when you're in the
If your job is journalism and you care about journalism, that is your business. It's your craft, but it's not your business. If you make cars, you sell cars. If you make pizza, you sell pizza. If you make journalism, don't... Yes, some people will pay for the subscriptions directly for the journalism, but most people will not because once it's in somebody else's hands, it's
Brett House (28:00)
Yeah.
Vanessa (28:19)
almost it's free or very cheap to replicate that informational content. So there's just a cap on how much you can directly sell your journalism for. Therefore, you have to have another business. So you do journalism, but your business is advertising. And advertising is like, it has to be a mix of that. Or you could do like events, or could do like all the other ways that people monetize ⁓ journalism. But a lot of it is like grabbing the attention.
So you've got this market that you're competing in and it's like this attention market, which again is finite. And then you compete against everybody else that can go grab attention. ⁓ And they can do it with all the low margin stuff. They can do it with user generated content. So Google, Meta, they're like, let's just aggregate all this free content to like, and get really good at capturing attention.
Brett House (29:09)
And
they can flood the zone. They can flood the zone with volume, which if you're... Yeah.
Rio (29:10)
Well,
In fact,
in fact, I would draw a distinction, like if those numbers out. So like New York Times released its Q1 2026 earnings and it had seven hundred twelve point two million dollars of revenue, which is a 12 percent increase year over year. ⁓ Subscriber growth, they added approximately three hundred and ten thousand net digital only subscribers. So they have the total subscriber base of 13.1 million. These are quite good. And granted, a lot of this was a lot of this revenue was from crosswords and other things that are not necessarily news. But
your point about the news business. think they've shown that they can build a growing and profitable news business. But then you compare that to Washington Post and they, I think they lost $110 million last year and $177 million over the previous two years. They eliminated roughly 30 % of the newsroom. And Jeff Bezos even said he thinks the problem is no one likes their product and they should be able to have a product that people like. think New York Times, maybe you could argue, has found that. But then you compare that to Metta.
3.56 billion daily average users, 200.97 billion with a B dollars in revenue. Last quarter they had 56.31 billion dollars. like there's a ton of advertising revenue out there. If you look at the advertising business, these news organizations, their businesses are minuscule, they're tiny. And since 2000, they're half the size. Publishing in general has lost 50 % of its revenue over the past
Vanessa (30:30)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brett House (30:39)
Yeah.
Rio (30:43)
26 years, which is just.
Brett House (30:45)
And advertisers
are going to go for that reach. They're going to go for the easiest, cheapest, expansive reach they can get. And if they're not getting it in these smaller publisher environments, that might be more risky. ⁓
Rio (30:51)
⁓
Well,
what's gone wrong, right? Like the advertising business has tripled in this time, quadrupled, yet the publishers have like, their business has been cut in half. Clearly they're not meeting market demand. It's very fascinating. It's put pressure on the news, the news businesses suffered. it's put tons of pressure on the actual news organizations themselves, right?
Brett House (31:19)
Yeah. And
Vanessa, do you think this is an opportunity for, a New York Times might be a pretty good example of this, to diversify the way they deliver their product with kind of pure investigative journalism plus derivative forms of content, which they're doing. They've got a great podcast or podcasts, crosswords. And so it seems like they're adapting to the game ⁓ of just general content and like meta-oriented content that's multiple formats, video formats, podcast formats. ⁓
Vanessa (31:20)
Mm-hmm, yeah.
It does, it does that.
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (31:49)
Yeah, do you think that's part of the play here? Because you're kind of making this point about ⁓ that investigative journalism, their business is not media, right? And it's more expensive and you've got to pay for good journalism, right? It costs more. And I think the market started going towards cheaper form, more voluminous content because you get better gross margins. You have to pay less for the content, but you get more of it and you can advertise against that more of it. Right. So what do you think the solution is for for ⁓
Vanessa (32:02)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Brett House (32:18)
publishers to Rios point about bringing back the dollars and the attention from advertisers.
Vanessa (32:24)
Well, it's going to differ based on the scope and the mission of the, of the journalism outlet. Like, it, given all this, the dynamics, is a miracle that there is any journalism out there at all. It really is. But why, why is there, but why is there still journalism? It's because look, I spend, ⁓ I spend a lot of time, ⁓ both in like the media and advertising world and a lot of time in the journalism world. They're a bit far apart. ⁓ and like.
Brett House (32:35)
That's a that's a good, it is. It seems overwhelming.
Rio (32:36)
That's a point.
Vanessa (32:54)
There's a lot of people in journalism that they are doing it for the love of the game. Thank God, because it is really important. People forego more lucrative careers and businesses. You could be a business like the New York Times.
Rio (33:11)
That's why I got out of journalism by
the way. I actually started as a stringer for a couple of years and it was impossible to make any money. Maybe I wasn't a great journalist, but it was really tough.
Brett House (33:18)
Yep.
Vanessa (33:21)
Yeah, but it's like, what do you want to do? I mean, people are still fundamentally going to do that for a couple. There's like an individual need, people have. There's also a base societal need for true information, like real information, things to get uncovered. So there's always going to be like a baseline market for that. because look, you could be the New York Times and like, that's a pretty good business for the New York Times. They're like the best example of somebody who's like won.
Brett House (33:50)
Yeah.
Vanessa (33:50)
They're
like them like why not why them and not the Washington Post? One of the reasons is like if you're to pay for a national a newspaper subscription You're usually gonna pay for one of them if you're a person that pays for a subscription So if it's between like there's only it's them Washington Post LA Times New York Times one that ⁓ There's you're not most people are not going to have any subscriptions to a national newspaper
Brett House (34:02)
Yeah.
Vanessa (34:15)
The people that do are usually going to have one subscription to a national newspaper and they diversified in all the other ways. like you've got these, so there are people who will do journalism because and will have journalism businesses in the same way that like Wikipedia exists where it could have been Google or Facebook. Wikipedia is infrastructure for the internet as much as Google or Facebook is. It's infrastructure for freaking Google and Facebook that Wikipedia is.
Brett House (34:33)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And for the LLMs.
Rio (34:44)
is
trading for AI.
Vanessa (34:45)
And for the LLMs,
Brett House (34:46)
Yeah.
Vanessa (34:46)
yeah. Now, like Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia, they're a successful nonprofit, but the amount of money that Wikipedia makes in comparison to Google and Meta is just in an entirely different universe. So ⁓ what has a more ⁓ positive impact on the world? mean, you leave that to your own judgments, but journalism is the same way. People will do it.
Brett House (35:01)
Yeah.
Vanessa (35:14)
because there's that need. That's their mission. That's what they want to do. They just need to be able to make a living at it. They need to be at least sustainable, at least ⁓ profitable. I think because of what they sell, their businesses are inextricably tied to both the advertising and the technology industries. Unfortunately for them. Unfortunately for journalism, it's tied to all those things.
Brett House (35:39)
Yep. Yeah, well, yeah, that's the
distribution mechanism and the monetization mechanism. And you have to adopt both of those things in order to survive and thrive, right? Do you think that audiences generally want, I mean, we, this is my question, I was gonna say, do they want neutral reporting, right, investigative journalism? But maybe the essence of this question is, are we too far gone?
Vanessa (35:47)
Yeah.
Definitely.
Brett House (36:07)
Are we too far gone in terms of, ⁓ we just want things to reinforce our worldviews, ⁓ which is kind of what the algorithms are doing. They're modeled after driving more engagement or more attention. And so the stuff that you engage with, it's going to continue to serve you more and more, which it's this downward spiral.
Rio (36:26)
or the feed you might, the social
feed you get depending on which political side you are is going to be completely different, right? mean, like, so people, like they want this stuff and they block their friends who don't agree with them. They're only getting content served up that validates their beliefs and opinions and gets them outraged, right?
Brett House (36:33)
Yeah.
Vanessa (36:45)
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (36:45)
Yeah.
Vanessa (36:46)
Yeah, and this is tied to an earlier thing you brought up, like objectivity. Like, people want neutral journalism? Do they want objective journalism? And people want it to the extent, in a similar way, that people want healthy food. But you also want not healthy food. There's different, we have two wolves inside of each of one of us, right?
Brett House (37:06)
Yeah.
Vanessa (37:10)
And one wolf wants ⁓ good information in journalism and one wolf wants the stuff that just feeds your biases. I mean, it's very much like healthy food. body needs and wants it. Yeah, yeah.
Brett House (37:23)
It your dopamine reactions, right? It feeds
your pleasure principle. Like I just had lunch, I had sardines and a salad, not particularly exciting. But next to that, I had ⁓ supremely spicy hummus with tortilla chips. I was doing both, because one of them is actually giving, to your point, there is a pleasure principle. People are seeking pleasure. They want to feel good or feel outraged. That's still an equally strong chemical reaction in the brain, right?
Vanessa (37:29)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, for sure. It's like fat,
salt, and sugar. I mean, it's very, I make this analogy all the time about food. so, like, are we too far gone? Look, I think we're just in a phase of the cycle because we're behind where food was. processing fast food came around to solve a problem.
Brett House (37:53)
Yeah.
Vanessa (38:14)
of ⁓ not enough calories, food insecurity, et cetera, like 20s, 30s, 40s. And now it's like, ⁓ look, we can put all these calories in food, yay. And what do people like? they like the stuff that's like fat, and sugar. Let's put more of that in there. And for a while, everyone's like, okay, we're just going to eat all of that because it is good. you have these food companies have these incentives. like, well, this is what the people want. And the people are like, yes, this is what we want. And then after a while, everyone's like, no.
Brett House (38:17)
Yeah, availability,
Yeah.
Vanessa (38:44)
Big problems. Like, we don't even know what we're eating. There's not even a food label on this.
Brett House (38:46)
Yeah, yeah, there's a
Rio (38:47)
Yeah.
Brett House (38:49)
big paradigm shift. Not to go down that tangent, but there's a big paradigm shift because in the past, the poor, we'll just say the poor, right, people that didn't have, you know, ways or means were often malnourished. We grew up watching that on television, right, save money. Now the poor are often overweight, right? There's an obesity epidemic. the food availability was there. It was just because they...
Vanessa (38:51)
Thank
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Rio (39:10)
Yeah, the access to quality
food is limited,
Brett House (39:13)
Yeah, they
drove down the cost of production and made it a dopamine driver. Sugar, salt, fat, sure, you know, the McDonald's sort of scenario, right? It's an interesting paradigm.
Vanessa (39:14)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (39:23)
But but but but
Vanessa (39:23)
That's
where information environment is now. It's at the apex of the worst part. There's this disease ramp, it's societal, it's widespread. Everyone's like, don't know what to do about it because everybody just wants it. And there's a few health food nuts that are like, we have a way out. That's a journalist. They're like, know, truthful information is also important.
Rio (39:24)
but
Brett House (39:26)
Yeah, we're a fast food nation.
No.
Yeah.
Vanessa (39:50)
But
people are recognizing this. It'll take some time and it's not ever going to be fully solved, I don't think. But there's a lot more health food options now than there were 20 years ago.
Rio (40:01)
Well,
Brett House (40:02)
Yeah,
Rio (40:02)
Vanessa,
Brett House (40:02)
yeah.
Rio (40:02)
think you just hit on something that's interesting too, because I heard this theory on a couple of other podcasts. I actually think there's something to it, And the theory, if you look at American history, right, you go back a hundred plus years, there were many, many local newspapers and publications, right? If you go back to like the time of the Revolutionary War, just Philadelphia might've had like 20 newspapers and all these little people were cranking them out in their basements. Benjamin Franklin would put out his own
Brett House (40:19)
Yeah.
Vanessa (40:29)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (40:30)
outlets, right.
Vanessa (40:31)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (40:31)
And there was this incredible fragmentation, regional, local of of news media, right. Because nobody really knows. And then. With the advent of modern communications, we had this mass media really for the first time, right. You know, starting, let's say, in the 40s, I guess, right. Up through what the 90s when it started to break apart, right. And the Internet is just completely. I mean, it's like.
Vanessa (40:36)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Rio (40:56)
It's punished. In fact, the last podcast, remember, we were talking about with with McKinley about how Craig's List took what was a 20 billion dollar business, right? The classified as business and made it a two billion dollar business. Right. It's just that revenue just disappeared and it. Yeah, for the newspapers, right. And then and then so it's just pummeled it. But what we're seeing now and like, you know, again, like, and I don't know, I think.
Brett House (41:12)
For the newspapers, for the traditional news. Yeah.
Vanessa (41:13)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (41:21)
I guess my point is we may be in a period of transition where we're going back to something more fragmented, where people are going to podcasts, they're going to TikTok, they're going to meta. Unfortunately, lot of these sources have contained bad information or misinformation or disinformation, but people are going to many, many more sources to get their news media as we have a refragmentation of what was the mass media. Thoughts on that?
Vanessa (41:42)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, there's all these cycles of consolidation and fragmentation. This is just this. mean, you've even seen like reconsolidation in some parts of the media, like lots of podcasts get bought up by podcast networks because like to get scale to distribute and like local outlets, a lot of them are going through consolidation by a few big local owners. know, local, one of the bright spots in the local news business is TV because
You know, it's you still have linear you still have and now local news getting ⁓ Can monetize through ctv as well, but you need the scale ⁓ of like having them all like share resources in order to fund journalists so in a lot of communities the strongest local journalism is either from tv or radio rather than a digital outlet but yeah, there's there's always cycles of fragmentation and consolidation and ⁓ because there's like the
There's a lot more fragmentation now. that, I mean, advertisers adapt to that too. Advertisers, I think it's so funny that they're like, ⁓ so hard to advertise on local news. It's like so many of them and like, it doesn't scale. And these ⁓ same agencies and brands will be like, how about creators? Let's do content creators. Do they have an audience of 50,000? Perfect. Seriously, they're so fragmented. It's so small, but they will like ⁓ figure out a way ⁓ to do it.
Brett House (43:05)
Speaking of fragmentation,
Rio (43:12)
Or audio,
right? how do like audio is really tough to, I mean, it's under monetized. you, despite people spending a lot of time listening to podcasts, is incredibly hard to actually do buys on podcasts or measure anything. So.
Vanessa (43:16)
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, well, like what I'd ultimately like to see obviously like I want to help help journalism thrive like there's a There's a return when people care about the quality like people not caring about ⁓ The kind of content that runs to only caring about the audience I mean, think this has been discussed quite a bit in the ad industry that that's ⁓ Not the best long-term strategy caring about the content that you're next to it really does matter and like valuing and ⁓
Like from an advertiser perspective on just like an impression by impression basis, you know, high quality journalism has shown to provide a better return across a lot of different KPIs, but like upper middle, lower funnel, just because of all the things you mentioned that are like, that I'll always talk about about the business of news, like why news is good. It just doesn't always get the same. Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (44:17)
Yeah, the higher household incomes, dedicated,
sort of dedicated, a sense captive audiences, right, that are highly engaged in longer form content sometimes.
Vanessa (44:25)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (44:28)
find it insane
that brands don't want to advertise next to news. mean, it seems so wrong to just do, but it seems ridiculous to me.
Vanessa (44:29)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's stupid. Like...
Yeah, and then it undermines the infrastructure for the rest of the media industry. And I don't think folks realize that a lot of other podcasts and YouTube channels and influencer content and stuff that gets like re-reported, a lot of that content wouldn't exist if not for the original journalism. So like it on its own, the original journalism is a valuable product that performs well compared to these other types of content.
Brett House (45:01)
Yeah.
Vanessa (45:09)
And it's infrastructure for the rest of the kind of media content that exists out there. And it's like societal infrastructure. Like if we don't, if we don't properly value it, ⁓ not just from the advertiser perspective, but from like a more holistic perspective, then it degrades the entire environment. So yeah.
Brett House (45:26)
Yeah, it's critical to
the, it's critical to the, love you. I'm obsessed with that food analogy. I thought that was a terrific analogy because I think historically it is really the same thing from, that happened to media at the local level. Like a lot of local businesses where you would buy, you'd go to your bread, and this still happens in France when you're in Paris, you go to neighborhoods and you go to your local, your local bread shop, your local cheese shop, your fruit vendor. A lot of that just fled.
Vanessa (45:32)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (45:33)
It actually
was good, yeah.
Vanessa (45:37)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brett House (45:55)
because they couldn't survive and it was concentrated in very large ⁓ mass supermarkets and the like.
Rio (46:01)
Well, one
Vanessa (46:02)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (46:02)
thing that's interesting about France too, like people bring up the food, right? And like, you know, they've made such an effort and investment in it, right? Culturally, obviously people really enjoy the, like, but, you know, like I lived in France for a few years, Vanessa. So I remember like, if you would bring a sandwich to your desk, they would, they would like, get out. You're not eating that here. It smells. don't want to, like, and then you have these things called TK restaurant, right? Which, which is this while where you actually comes out of your paycheck and your company contributes, the government contributes and they expire.
Vanessa (46:18)
Yeah. ⁓
Rio (46:29)
And you have to spend these basically coupons at local places. So encourages you to go and spend it. So the French have made a big effort, Brett, to your point, to subsidize these businesses, make sure they survive because food is important to them. So don't know. So looking at journalism, maybe you could make an argument that we should be doing something similar here because of the structural and economic pressures on the business. Because I agree it's critically important.
Vanessa (46:38)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And it's not just the advertisers that need to value and consider as infrastructure. The tech companies do too. Because if your business is just aggregating as much attention as possible and then selling it to advertisers, that is the business that Google and Metta have been in for a very long time. It's just selling the attention. It does not matter where the content comes from. And all ⁓ the algorithms can just optimize.
Brett House (46:54)
Yeah.
Vanessa (47:22)
towards ⁓ that engagement. Engagement is just a really terrible proxy, it's almost like an inverse proxy for ⁓ reliability and minimal bias. If you think of the emotions that are most engaging, is number one anger, number two cuteness, and then ⁓ joy, and then other things below that. Anger being the number one thing that influences a lot.
And so the, and because of like user generated content, like the gross margin on that is, amazing. It's pretty much it's free. Like all the platforms is invested in the infrastructure to allow that, the, the UGC, ⁓ and then they can, and they can just aggregate all, the attention. Like you talked about short form versus long form. ⁓ it's, mean, the platforms are trying to capture.
Brett House (47:59)
Yeah, and the creators,
Vanessa (48:14)
a long chunk of your finite attention per day, four hours, six hours. That's long form. It's just all broken up into little chunks of less than three second videos on TikTok or less than three minute videos on Reels. It doesn't matter how Facebook or YouTube gets those hours.
Brett House (48:30)
Yeah.
Vanessa (48:43)
out of you. They want like four or six or eight hours or more. People have it.
Brett House (48:44)
Yeah. Yeah.
Rio (48:49)
Whether it's watching
shorts or watching like, you know, a two hour video and a guy making a sword in Japan, people will watch, people will watch crazy stuff on YouTube. It doesn't matter.
Vanessa (48:52)
Right.
Brett House (48:53)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And
one, the rise of ⁓ verticals, right, where they actually take an hour long or an hour and a half long. ⁓ It could be a multi multi episode series, but let's say an hour and a half episode and they break it down into a hundred three minute pieces. I know there's some companies that are doing this right now and every piece, every every snippet that you watch has sort of a cliffhanger.
Vanessa (49:00)
huh.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (49:20)
And they've gamified the entire content conception experience. so if you watch the next, you get coins or some sort of monetization, micropayment, whatever, something that encourages you to keep watching it. And so they've basically taken what might be a $3.99 ⁓ purchase on Apple TV, and they've now monetized it at $25 or $30 for that same one hour and a half piece of content, which I think is interesting and remarkable. my question to this is, do you think ⁓
Vanessa (49:30)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (49:50)
there is appetite, and I've certainly seen it in my behavior and my kids behavior, Rio, and I talk about this all the time, for long form content. ⁓ Or are we in a sense right now going through a shift in how consumers engage in content and they engage through largely video visual mediums, largely shorter form content? Do you think that there's a shift happening here that investigative journalism and news needs to adapt to? Or do you think we just stick to the like,
you know, there's one way, right? Do you think that's necessary for the survival?
Vanessa (50:22)
Yeah.
I think there would be like, ⁓ people have ⁓ different, differing ways that they like to, ⁓ take in information that's evolved over time. like how our brains evolve, ⁓ like, ⁓ written, written content, like reading and writing is one way there's, like video content, obviously like, audio visual, like those are like the primary ways.
And there are some differences in how people naturally process stuff. And I think a lot of the like, consumers want this. ⁓ We have to distinguish between whether it's like an addictive type of behavior that's being formed for us or it's a natural preference. Because natural preference is like, if you let them, if you let those sort like a little bit more naturally, I think you just see a lot more ⁓ diversity because like I, I am a person who likes to read.
Brett House (51:05)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.
Vanessa (51:20)
I know not everyone is a big reader, but I like to read and the length of the content doesn't matter. If it's a long idea, like a book, I want to read the whole book. I don't want to read a freaking AI summary of it. don't need everything to be... Look, sometimes you need something faster, right? ⁓ Yeah. But even I prefer text content versus video content because I can read faster than I can listen.
Brett House (51:34)
You were not a Cliff Notes person in high school. You have a test tomorrow.
Vanessa (51:50)
to a video or somebody started talking. Yeah. And a lot of people are like that. I mean, we have been reading for centuries ⁓ as a species. have not been so like for me, no, when somebody when LinkedIn tries to force a three minute video into my feed, I'm like, I am just not an illiterate short attention span baby. Like, why are you treating me like that? And so I don't like it in the New York Times. I don't like it in
Brett House (51:50)
Yeah, you might be a visual learner. Yeah.
Rio (51:51)
I remember better too when I read.
Brett House (51:56)
Yeah, me too.
Rio (52:09)
Thank you.
Vanessa (52:19)
Like they try to make the story into a vertical video. I'm like, I, there's enough vertical video in my life. The fact that Facebook and Tik Tok have figured out how to addict you to short form video does not mean we have a natural propensity for like, that's how we like to consume information. Like that is like an external pressure on the, like an addictive, it's, it's been gamified. It's been, ⁓ created to like,
Brett House (52:38)
Yeah.
Vanessa (52:48)
hijack our emotional our brain responses and then Yeah
Brett House (52:52)
Yeah, it's fast food content. mean, that's back to the food analogy.
Rio (52:54)
Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting to say that too, because
I have a good friend. was a journalist in Germany and she actually quit because of what you're describing that she said that, that, you she worked for the public broadcast station, which is, which is quite big. And they were pressuring her. She was making long form video and articles. Right. And she did this for years. You do long exposés on really, really interesting things. Right. And then they were saying, we want, they wanted her to create TikTok videos.
and they want a TikTok engagement and Instagram, that's all they cared about, right? And she just said, I don't want to do this. I just is not like to your point before, many journalists get into it because they love the game. They believe they are making a difference. These are idealists. They want to make the world a better place. And she was like, I don't want to have a big social media following. I want to make amazing content. And she eventually just, she's school teacher now. She's just had enough. So I just think that's a shame. And maybe there's something there.
Vanessa (53:25)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brett House (53:47)
Yeah, another
underpaid profession. You know, right?
Vanessa (53:50)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (53:50)
Yeah. But
I do have a question though. mean, kind of ties back to other podcasts we've had here about monetization of the business model and the digital side. If it's a switch from traditional to digital, I always felt it was such a missed opportunity, right? That you look at how the digital revenue was just using open exchange, using programmatic, seemed to be the main.
Brett House (54:02)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rio (54:17)
I mean, I'm not saying that that shouldn't have been an avenue. These publications explored, right? So clearly you have traffic, you should monetize it, but not logging people in, relying on open exchange where it's been a race to the bottom, low CPMs, you know, money being siphoned off by the, you know, the walled gardens. It just seems like it's been, that was a terrible decision not to focus on. mean, how is television sold? It's sold through making deals like at the upfronts. I mean, don't know why more inventory wasn't always sold that way.
to the same advertisers and you go to these publishers, they'll have a digital team and they'll have the legacy team and they don't even talk or share information. I always thought that was such a missed opportunity to try to sell digital media more in the way that traditional media was. So maybe it couldn't have happened. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just think that's a missed opportunity to try.
Brett House (55:02)
Yeah, they didn't think direct sales could
scale and compete. I what was the challenge there is the question, Direct sales of premium audiences that have been authenticated, right? Which was the shift that they...
Rio (55:14)
They've got the inventory,
they've got the audience data. If you have subscribers, force them to log in, right? You know who they are. That's gold, right?
Vanessa (55:22)
Yeah, but again, that's like an audience data selling business, which is a different business than journalism. ⁓ It's a media business and you see where you see the ⁓ businesses like succeed or fail or ⁓ just go off in the ⁓ wrong directions. I think it has to do with a balance of people who like journalism people in the ⁓ news organization and the business people in the news organization.
Brett House (55:50)
Yeah, and there was always a Chinese
wall between them, right, editorial integrity and things.
Vanessa (55:53)
Well,
yeah, but you need both of those folks, those kinds of folks in pretty good balance and they need to listen to each other. I think that that's where you will find a successful journalism business. And there are examples of this. ⁓ There are examples like when you look at something like Wall Street Journal or Financial Times or Bloomberg,
Brett House (56:02)
Yeah.
Vanessa (56:16)
They have a particular built-in advantages because their subscriber bases are the financial services industry. That is their beat. Their subscribers have money to pay for it. Their employers even will pay for it. It will attract high-end advertisers and stuff. you even see that business... They have this good balance between... Yes, they financial services stuff that only they have. And the Wall Street Journal sends people into war zones.
like to cover that stuff. Like they obviously have a commitment to that there internally.
Brett House (56:43)
Yeah.
But hold on, let me challenge yourself because you said that journalism and audience businesses are separate. They're different. And I would say that journalism, hasn't journalism always been the business of audience? Right? Because what are you creating the content for? Yeah, yeah.
Vanessa (57:00)
Well, I'm talking about selling audience data. Selling audience
data is a fairly new business. And it's a very high tech business very quickly. mean, talking about UIDs, You're talking about cookies and IDs and everything the ad industry has been ⁓ going back and forth over for many years. ⁓ when you see, sometimes there's really big disconnects in a small local ⁓ outlet.
Brett House (57:11)
Yeah.
Rio (57:11)
I think
you just hit on it.
Brett House (57:27)
Yeah.
Vanessa (57:30)
I went to a conference once. was a big tech company put it on for news publishers. were attempting to help smaller news publishers monetize better. And they're trying to bring together big agencies and brands and small journalists. And again, the gulf between those two is sometimes very wide. So you would have like
a local niche, like micro community ⁓ newspaper that like the ⁓ editor like mortgages house to make sure he could pay salaries and these are like small salaries for the staff to cover the local news in the community. And they're like, gee, how can I sell more advertising to like these big companies and stuff? And the agency folks are like, well, you have a data scientist so you can collect your first party data. And I was like,
Rio (58:28)
They have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah.
Vanessa (58:28)
That person does not even know what you
has, and they should hire a data scientist? Like they cannot, did you hear that they mortgaged, the mortgage on their house is not enough to pay the salary of the data scientist.
Brett House (58:38)
What but but but
Rio (58:39)
Vanessa,
I think you just said something really important. mean, the technical aspect to this, right? So you think of Brett, and by the way, I completely agree with what you just said. Like the old newspaper business, you basically have an audience. You can prove to the advertiser who trusts you, here's my subscriber base, who's going to be delivered this newspaper. And I think, totally. And think about it, but think about it.
Brett House (58:58)
Yeah, and you have a circulation manager, right? That's your data scientist that says, is how much circulation
we have of the audience that you want to reach or to the audience that you want to reach.
Rio (59:06)
And look at a television.
When did television take off? Television advertising didn't take off until Nielsen. We talked about this last week, right? With Gowden and Kinley. It didn't take off until Nielsen went in. It wasn't a perfect way to actually show what household, what households you're advertising, but it actually, but it was enough to establish trust to productize the inventory.
Brett House (59:12)
Yep.
Rio (59:26)
and approach the advertisers who would then trust you that they could make investment in it because they knew what they were buying. I don't think that's ever emerged in the digital space. And I think a lot of these traditional publishers like, it's tech, it's really hard. And forget about ad tech. I there's this entire supply chain there. And then I don't think there's ever been that level of trust or consistency away. And I think that's where it went wrong.
Brett House (59:50)
Yeah, no, but I'm going to make the argument for that. just before you say is that I do think that journalists, like from a transformation of mindset in business practice, ⁓ you have to be audience data oriented.
Vanessa (59:50)
Well... Yeah.
Brett House (1:00:04)
I would say that those two things are inextricably linked because audience data is reflective of the people that you're reaching, your constituents, whether it's local or national or otherwise. And that's what you then go and have to monetize and sell against. So you should be in the business of not pandering, but writing to that audience base and then being able to at least package it up enough to say, you're able to reach this really rich, important critical audience at the local level or otherwise.
Vanessa (1:00:09)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, and so every successful example of a news outlet that's made it in this environment has done that. ⁓ They've found that balance. But it's real easy to go in this direction. If the balance is more business people and the monetization and the audience and then the journalism, that's when you get these outlets that will just publish a ton of evergreen content and you see the...
This has happened with hedge funds buying local news outlets. Yeah, so they'll just like cut all the journalism staff. They're like, oh, we get plenty of web traffic. Here's our audience. Here's who you can reach in a local community. They'll invest in all the audience ID and logins and paywalls and stuff like that. But then they'll just like reduce it to the bare minimum of journalism that they can have. we don't like that. Yeah.
Brett House (1:01:02)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah the ⁓ newspaper now is like, yeah.
Rio (1:01:23)
Yeah, but plenty of audience, plenty of traffic
for now until you completely destroy it. Then next thing you know, you don't, right? I just think that's a downhill.
Vanessa (1:01:27)
Exactly.
Brett House (1:01:30)
Yeah, and Gannett...
Vanessa (1:01:30)
And then those publishers are getting eaten up by AI. ⁓ the more like commoditized your, because that what kind of content are they producing? They're producing like they're just re syndicating wire service content. ⁓ They're, getting like free content elsewhere. They're re they're rewriting stuff. They're even doing AI generated stuff and like
Brett House (1:01:43)
Yeah, exactly.
Vanessa (1:01:51)
that stuff's not valuable anymore. like that's getting eaten up by like this next technology wave of AI. But you have like these good local publishers like Minnesota Star Tribune or Philadelphia Inquirer, where they're local and robust. They've got a good balance. They've got the journalism folks with the mission that they listen to, and they've got the business folks that figure out, all right, what's the right combination of subscription plus advertising plus events? And like they do it responsibly. What's hard for it, which makes it so much harder.
for these outlets is like advertising and technology changes really, really quickly. ⁓ like, and the journal, like the work to do journalism and gather it, that's like somewhat consistent. have to like go on and verify facts and sources and interview people and write it and edit it. And like, that's been fairly consistent.
The advertising technology, like it's gone from, all right, we want digital and now there's Google, now there's meta, now there's YouTube, now there's AI. Like that all happened in the last 20 years. And again, to even adapt to each one of those businesses is pretty impressive. It would help if advertisers and technology companies would just not like actively disadvantage them.
Brett House (1:03:07)
Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah.
Vanessa (1:03:07)
in when that happens like really watch
watch out for them because like it's it's necessary like if the Julie Brown from the Miami Herald in 2018 ⁓ It's the one who broke the story on Jeffrey Epstein ⁓ and it without that Local reporter if that had not had and it was like dog in determination It was a very difficult story to get I mean the amount of powers she had to fight against she had to like get sex trafficking victims
Rio (1:03:22)
Just a local reporter, right? Yeah.
Vanessa (1:03:35)
to tell their stories on the record. It was very ⁓ painstaking work. It changed the world though. And like, look how much content is out there now because of that one Epstein story on social media and YouTube and everywhere else, right? The infrastructure.
Rio (1:03:50)
If she hadn't broken out, you're right.
could be things could look very different today.
Brett House (1:03:54)
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it's almost like thematically. It's like you get a flattening. I I saw this happen at Gannett where they started to syndicate national news into the local venues because they were amalgamating all of these local publishers. And you get sort of a, get kind of a, I'm going to call it a deadening of culture, right? Because all the local markets, just like we talked about Paris versus suburban America, right? There's a value to that local richness, that local richness of perspective of
Vanessa (1:03:54)
Yeah.
Yeah?
Brett House (1:04:24)
of identity, whether it's food or news, right? It's critical to like a thriving society. And AI only seems to be to your point, because you kind of pointed that sort of trajectory out. It's only getting worse. I'm trying not to catastrophize here. ⁓ AI, what do you think AI's impact in terms of, because there has been a lot of talk about it, flattening.
Vanessa (1:04:37)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brett House (1:04:47)
flattening the discourse, flattening perspectives, ⁓ everything, yeah, flattening the content itself. Do you think that's a danger and do you think, how do we control this sort of runaway train?
Rio (1:04:51)
finding the content itself.
Vanessa (1:05:00)
Well, we've seen some early studies like ⁓ we looked at this like with index exchange, they did a good study ⁓ with measuring like ⁓ deprecation in ad slots and traffic to different types of publishers and like bringing out the types of publishers. So yeah, like publisher traffic is collapsing, but it's collapsing a lot more to just generic commoditized type of content. News is actually ⁓ feeling like the least amount of traffic decline because
One AI is they've realized that the accuracy with which they can summarize new news is quite low and like the mistakes are really high stakes. So they try to, they refrain from doing it a little less and asking a chat bot for the news of the day is like not a very good experience compared to going to like a New York Times or Wall Street Journal page. Yeah.
Brett House (1:05:52)
Or even a feed, yeah. I don't know if
I've ever actually done that, asked a ChachiBTR or Propoxity. Yeah.
Vanessa (1:05:57)
A lot of users do not.
the traffic to those pages, yes, referral traffic has gone down a lot, but ⁓ direct traffic for many of the publishers hasn't gone down. Like Wall Street Journal, their traffic has gone up. Their total traffic has gone up. So news is somewhat insulated because it's this new information, ⁓ original from the source.
The other thing is like AI companies realize that you need human label data. You need human generated data for it to not flatten. And then there's also like a broader cultural resistance in certain quarters to having to read a bunch of AI generated text. I mean, I don't like it. Like it's fine if it's like marketing copy or whatever, but if it matters, I would like to read
something written by a human and know it was written. People's detection of, even if they're not like a English major, a love rhetorical analysis, they can get a sense like, I think this was written by AI. And...
Rio (1:07:00)
Yeah.
Brett House (1:07:04)
Yep.
Rio (1:07:05)
It's getting harder to
tell, but people generally can, yeah.
Brett House (1:07:06)
Yeah. And the more you use AI, the more you can recognize AI written content.
Rio (1:07:10)
Okay,
Vanessa (1:07:11)
Exactly.
Rio (1:07:11)
Vanessa, mentioned index exchange. Speaking of add to companies, I read recently about a deal you made with Viant. I wonder if you could maybe spend a moment talking about that. It sounded really cool.
Vanessa (1:07:19)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Brett House (1:07:19)
Yes.
Vanessa (1:07:23)
Yeah, so CTV and news. There's lots of news in CTV. As everyone who is in the ad tech space, not everyone in the world, everyone in the ad tech space knows that CTV is not as transparent as URLs on the internet. Like every piece of content on the internet has a URL and you can see what's on there. CTV, how it gets delivered in the bid stream is mostly app IDs.
and sometimes not any other information. It's like, here's CTV content from this publisher. That's it. Like LG or whatever. But there are some CTV apps and publishers that will provide additional metadata as to what the actual content is. It's varied the amount of transparency that there is from the publisher. you Vine.
Rio (1:08:15)
Oh yeah, and by the way,
before you continue on, some people in the audience may not know that Vient is a DSP, a demand side platform where people can go in and actually buy advertising inventory across lots of different places. And one of Vient's big focuses has been CTV or connected television, which has been growing. think 18 % per year has been growing very quickly. And sorry, Vanessa, I cut you off, but over to you. people may not know that.
Vanessa (1:08:21)
Yes.
Yes.
No, yeah,
that's good. Sometimes we just jump right into the ad tech stuff and forget that folks might not have that background. the, yeah, so CTV, ⁓ so Vyant bought Iris about 18 months ago and Iris has, ⁓ it has an ID that attaches a lot of different metadata to individual videos at the video level.
Brett House (1:08:42)
Hahaha
It's like a content
identifier, right?
Vanessa (1:09:03)
Yes,
content identifier. we love when ⁓ content can be identified because when content can be identified, then we can say, ⁓ this is news and this is how reliable and biased it is. So because of that integration, we've been working with the folks at Iris even before they ⁓ went over to Viant, but it was just a perfect opportunity because ⁓ we get signals from like CTV bid requests from Iris Viant.
Brett House (1:09:08)
Yes.
Vanessa (1:09:32)
and we're able to label like, all right, this portion of it is high quality news. So a buyer can buy high quality news, CTV. A lot of it is local, which is great. And yeah, it does. ⁓ And, and scale and scale.
Rio (1:09:42)
Trust, it creates trust, right?
Brett House (1:09:45)
Yeah, yeah. you're basically, yep.
Yeah. So it acts almost like a suppression or at least an identification of ⁓ reliable, accurate, political, or non-biased content. Is that the general, minimally biased?
Vanessa (1:10:01)
Yeah, like minimally biased content. know, there's stuff
like a little like, I mean, look, there's nothing wrong with like stuff that's left and right. Just it doesn't include like the super extreme stuff. So as long as it meets a certain reliability threshold, we include it and we ⁓ gone out to market saying like, hey, if you want to buy, if you want to buy high quality CTV news, it's just an easy way to do it is a deal on this platform and buy it's platform.
Brett House (1:10:25)
And have you seen increases in ⁓ volume and reach as a result of enabling advertisers to do this at scale within Viya?
Vanessa (1:10:36)
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, and it's in, Viant. I mean, we just, we just launched this partnership, but it's after, it's after a great start. ⁓ and it's, it's nice that, ⁓ it's in C, in CTV, which is an area where there's just a lot of, ⁓ excitement and momentum anyways. it's, it's a TV channel. Like TV is a great place to advertise. Always has been since linear. So like, like, so now it's like available more pro programmatically than yeah.
Brett House (1:10:53)
Yeah.
Yep, sign's out in motion.
Vanessa (1:11:06)
And we, but we see it across the entire programmatic ecosystem. People want to, because we have our segments and people can buy our segments, ⁓ in the trade desk through the various SSP index change, ⁓ Pumatic, OpenX, into the DSP platforms. ⁓ but they can just isolate like on the open web. I want to be able to buy high quality news, ⁓ on, on, on CTV. I want to buy them. Yeah. And with a scale.
Brett House (1:11:31)
Yeah, without the risks. Yeah, without. Yeah. So it's giving people a technical weight.
Yeah. With the scale, exactly the scale to reach those audiences that they might.
Vanessa (1:11:36)
Yeah.
Rio (1:11:37)
Yeah, the scale because they
can go through these platforms that automate the buying and then with having the trust that they're buying like legitimate high quality inventory on legitimate sites that are not supervised.
Brett House (1:11:45)
Yeah. And do you guys actively
Vanessa (1:11:47)
Yeah, exactly.
Brett House (1:11:49)
partner
with the IASs or the Double Verifies in terms of, or do you find yourself in deals where there's a collaborative effort to ensure that, or is it competitive?
Rio (1:11:58)
Or is it competitive?
Vanessa (1:12:01)
Yeah, I think we approach a thing from different perspectives. They are brand safety companies. So ultimately, the focus is more like excluding things that are not safe. ⁓ I think they got that pretty well covered. So ⁓ we really specialize in news. News is a category that is unlike other categories on the internet. ⁓ You can't really use a very blunt approach with news.
because it has these unique characteristics and I think it's societally uniquely important. So folks can still use their like IS and double verify like ⁓ brand safety blockers when they're used. Yeah, like they can buy, they can, exactly. they, so I ⁓ don't think of them as competitors. There's like different areas of the, the ⁓ different kind of problems we're trying to solve. So an advertiser, if,
Rio (1:12:42)
brand safety, brand suitability for ad verification, all that stuff. Yeah.
Vanessa (1:12:58)
If an advertiser is not advertising on news at all, which is a case with a lot of big advertisers, unfortunately, what we're yeah, and using IS and DoubleVerify for ⁓ everything across the internet, that's fine. Like they can come, they can use, they can buy an ad font as segment and open web, the CTV and say, I'm going to buy all this high quality news. And they can still have their ⁓
Brett House (1:13:03)
Yeah, more than it should be. ⁓
Rio (1:13:04)
Too bad, yeah.
Vanessa (1:13:23)
like a category or particular keywords that they're very sensitive to and they can like use that to block and they'll block some of that news but like whereas before they were buying zero they look at ad font as news like all right we're gonna buy this inventory we're gonna block a little bit at using IAS and double verify still but that's still so much more than we were buying before so it works
Brett House (1:13:43)
Yeah,
So to me, it's been nice. I think maybe we will end with quick hits, but I think your story, your founder story, it's kind of inspiring me because I'm a founder as well. But I don't know if I'm basing my founding of a company on such a ⁓ great sort of moral pillar ⁓ because I think there's this underlying story, least that's your narrative. It's a good one. But I think it's truth is that
there is that you're really fighting for something that we all need to have. It's kind of like fighting for good food in a world awash with ⁓ fast food, right? Society needs it. It's like your mission statement could be we're defenders of democracy. At least that's what Lou Pascales is out there saying. And it raises emotion. It actually causes people, might be provocative, to turn their head and to say, yeah, you can be in advertising media.
Rio (1:14:12)
We need it, yeah, society needs it.
Vanessa (1:14:23)
Yeah
Brett House (1:14:36)
measurement, analytics, whatever, and actually still be doing something that's making us better, right? That's not ⁓ just pure profit motive, but about keeping the things that are good ⁓ in our society for long-term benefit. so kudos to you. I think it's really inspirational. ⁓ Yeah. And should we do a quick hits? Yeah. So you want to start, Rio?
Vanessa (1:14:52)
Yeah.
Thank you so much. appreciate those kind words.
Let's do it.
Rio (1:15:04)
Yes, I think I know what you're going to say to this based on what you said, but I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear from you. So is objective journalism actually achievable or is all media inherently shaped by perspective?
Vanessa (1:15:17)
Yes and no, think the definition of objective, people will debate that. News can be presented as minimally biased as possible. People can really try to just bring ⁓ the important facts to folks. So it's absolutely possible and people do want it.
Brett House (1:15:33)
Yeah, do you think that there's a place in our society, maybe other societies, for the traditional news anchors, the Dan Rathers, the Brian Williams, you know, or creators, UGC content creators, sort of replacing them? What do you see between those two worlds happening going forward?
Vanessa (1:15:48)
⁓ I think
there's absolutely a place for it. you think about it, nightly news is not just about the anchor. It's about ⁓ taking 30 minutes to focus on like ⁓ 10 to 13 or 14 curated stories that took all day or maybe a couple of days to put together in video packages with real journalists on the ground. It's a highly valuable format because
of the density of actual journalism. There's a lot of most valuable journalism in the nightly news broadcasts of major news publishers. It's a lot denser than a similar hour on a cable news show where there's four topics all about what happened at the White House today, 35 pundits on it, no original journalism whatsoever. that nightly broadcast is a lot more dense than a 30 minute take.
Brett House (1:16:19)
Yeah.
Vanessa (1:16:40)
by a creator who like read about it.
Brett House (1:16:43)
Yeah, yeah, like information deaths,
Rio (1:16:47)
What's more dangerous to society today? Misinformation, disinformation, or the loss of trust in institutions?
Vanessa (1:16:55)
Hmm. Yeah, I think people not knowing what to trust is a broader thing that captures both of those things. I often say people trust things that aren't true all the time. Trusting truth are not the same thing. There's a couple ways to get people to trust you. One is to tell them a bunch of true things the best you can. Another way is to lie to them.
people base what they, whether they trust something on some shortcuts that aren't not necessarily very reliable. Like, ⁓ do I feel this person is authentic? Do I feel like I have a relationship with this person? Those are actually, yeah, those are sort of poor proxies for like, it does actual evidence.
Brett House (1:17:39)
Yeah, regardless of the facts.
Rio (1:17:45)
Well, that's why maybe there are fewer consequences for
lying today, right? There's almost no consequence for lying today.
Vanessa (1:17:50)
Correct.
Brett House (1:17:50)
Yeah, yeah,
that's been established from the top down. will AI, yeah, leadership does matter. Will AI, without naming names, will AI ultimately improve media quality through better verification? Or do you think it's going to flood the internet with garbage? Or do you think there's a light at the end of this tunnel that if we control for it govern for it properly, what do you think?
Vanessa (1:17:55)
Leadership matters, yeah.
I am naturally inclined to be an optimist as an entrepreneur. ⁓ I think in the short term, AI is, is actively making our news environment worse. and the, ⁓ experience that we've had with social media, ⁓ and not, not regulating and not, ⁓ not doing enough collectively to combat the
⁓ like the negative, yeah, negative, yeah, yes. The fact that we haven't done it with social media, ⁓ even though the deleterious effects are really apparent. ⁓ The fact that at the same time, both AI, ⁓ the rapid change in AI and the proliferation of gambling and prediction markets is all happening at the same time. It's like, ⁓
Brett House (1:18:46)
the negative impacts psychologically and yeah.
Yeah.
Vanessa (1:19:12)
I don't have a ton of faith in the ⁓ regulation, government regulation of such industries. And we'll have to have like market dynamics correct that. ⁓ But when power is really concentrated among certain players within markets, that makes it difficult too. So you said that we, like we could do good things as with our jobs and our positions and stuff.
Brett House (1:19:24)
Yep. Yeah.
Vanessa (1:19:41)
People in the advertising industry and people who are high up at big companies should realize that they have an enormous market power influence to do good things with their positions. So they should.
Brett House (1:19:50)
Yeah,
it's almost like we had one with this, but it's almost like we have to redefine the term addiction, right? And make anything that has ⁓ a unnatural impact on dopamine and other chemical responses that cause, like gambling, should have some level of regulatory, not to be like super heavy handed on the regulation perspective, but social media. I think the science is coming out.
Rio (1:20:12)
Just
phones, people addicted to their phones.
Brett House (1:20:15)
Yeah.
And my kids are like, you know, dad, you know, they're not kids anymore, know, 19 and 16. And they say, dad, you know, we got screwed. You don't understand. And I'm like, well, I grew up, I grew up in the birth of the Internet. And it's sort of our generation, Generation X that sort of created this problem. But they but I think they're starting to I think they're starting to recognize and there is a there is a anti tech, anti AI push, especially in the younger generations.
Vanessa (1:20:30)
huh.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rio (1:20:36)
No, we can blame the boomers, Brett. It's easy to blame the boomers.
Brett House (1:20:45)
where they see it as they know that they're being manipulated. They're very well aware of it. It's like that David Bowie. Yeah.
Vanessa (1:20:48)
Mm-hmm. It's good, yep.
Rio (1:20:49)
Well, it's because they're aware of it, that's an improvement. But think
about it, they didn't grow up like drinking from garden hoses, running around like all day, like we did. I mean, they missed out on that, which is actually kind of a shame.
Brett House (1:20:58)
Yeah,
yeah, drink it.
Vanessa (1:21:00)
Mm-hmm. Yeah,
that's the thing that gives me the optimism though, is that ⁓ pendulum swing, if we have a two tech addicted generation, the kids see that and they're like, I don't want that. We gotta make that different.
Brett House (1:21:07)
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Rio (1:21:16)
IRL
turned in real life, right? There's a rebound everywhere.
Brett House (1:21:20)
Yeah, it
Vanessa (1:21:21)
Mm-hmm.
Brett House (1:21:21)
cuts right
through all the noise, right? You get right to the truth of the matter when you're with real people, seeing real responses and the such. hey, Vanessa, we could go on forever. think this was, I don't know if you broke our record, but I think we're approaching an hour and 20 minutes, which is great. Thank you for joining us. It was a pleasure. You lived up to all the hype. We've heard nothing but good things about you. I'm like, I'm so glad that she's coming on.
Vanessa (1:21:29)
Is
Rio (1:21:38)
It's been fun.
Vanessa (1:21:40)
Love talking to you guys. ⁓
Rio (1:21:46)
Yeah. Yeah. I
saying, Brett, we have to have this conversation. It's going to be a good one. Yeah. Yeah.
Vanessa (1:21:48)
Thanks to my hype man Lou. I'm super popular on LinkedIn. ⁓ Hit me up on LinkedIn, especially if you're in this advertising industry. But our website, adfontesmedia.com. ⁓
Brett House (1:21:50)
Yeah, exactly.
So Vanessa, how do people get in touch with you?
Vanessa (1:22:08)
Actually, there's nothing to do with ads, it's Latin for to the fountain, to the source. Adfantesmedia.com. yeah, I'll see y'all at Cannes. We're a digital world, the ⁓ people matter. We fly across the country, across the world to see each other in person. So I'll be there.
Brett House (1:22:12)
⁓
Yeah, we'll be there.
Rio (1:22:19)
Totally.
Brett House (1:22:26)
Yeah,
we'll see you there. So yeah, we'll be there filming with Hearst at the Hearst House, running a lot of really cool content out of the show. So it's going to be a fun event. So everybody check out www.signalannoyce.ai, obviously on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. And we will see you next time.
Rio (1:22:27)
We will both be there.
Vanessa (1:22:29)
Yay!
Yeah.
Thanks guys.
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