09/22/2021
NewsGuard and Zefr Partner to Help Advertisers Reduce News Category Blocking, Expanding Reach on Trusted News Content in Video
The partnership will enable brands to support responsible marketing initiatives in video and expand audience reach via partnership between Zefr and NewsGuard
(September 22, 2021 — New York) With the continued importance of trusted news in society, advertisers are prioritizing responsible and principled marketing strategies to support quality news content that aligns to their brand and audience’s values. But in the last year, the usage of legacy brand safety tools in the open web, like semantic blocklists, has led to the unintentional consequences of blocking trusted news content and reducing advertiser reach. Today, Zefr and NewsGuard are announcing a new partnership to help brands target trustworthy news in video without overblocking—while avoiding content that falls outside of their suitability standards.
Through the partnership, Zefr, a leader in brand suitability for video, has incorporated NewsGuard’s news reliability ratings into its advertising options for marketers. Advertisers can partner with Zefr to activate NewsGuard’s Responsible Advertising for News targeting list featuring channels from trusted news sources vetted by NewsGuard’s team of trained journalists—expanding reach on quality news channels.
NewsGuard’s ratings are conducted using a journalistic, rigorous process involving basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic process, helping to ensure that news channels deemed credible are high-quality and suitable for any brand. With the new feature, brands and agencies will be able to direct their ads toward highly trustworthy news channels that have passed NewsGuard’s proprietary analysis.
“Putting proper controls in place that monitor brand safety, brand suitability, and brand integrity is imperative to the success of our clients’ business,” said Alexis Sandler, Associate Director, Global Digital Standards, PMX. “Online video content and trusted news sources reach highly engaged audiences, so it’s important to have tools that protect brands from misinformation on video and social platforms.”
As NewsGuard has previously reported, major brands regularly and inadvertently place ads on misinformation websites, creating a reputation risk for the brands and a financial boon for the hoax websites. A recent NewsGuard report found that advertisers are unintentionally spending $2.6 billion a year on programmatic advertising on misinformation and hoax sites, helping to explain the scale of the “infodemic.” For example, more than 4,000 top brands placed ads on sites spreading COVID-19 hoaxes and more than 1,600 brands advertised on sites that published falsehoods about the 2020 U.S. elections.
As awareness builds around this phenomenon, leading brands and agencies have begun to take action to mitigate the problem. Global ad agencies Publicis, IPG, and Omnicom have partnered with NewsGuard to take advantage of its Responsible Advertising on News segments (RANS), a brand safety protection that ensures media investment is being siphoned to trusted and responsible news publishers.
Through the new partnership, Zefr will enable brands to apply this NewsGuard capability to advertisers on video platforms as well.
The partnership not only helps brands stay protected against unsuitable content — it also enables advertisers to expand the reach of their campaigns to reach the highly engaged audiences that consume video news content.
“After careful research it became clear that NewsGuard’s human intelligence process offers by far the most comprehensive, most transparent, most up to date, and most reliable standards for advertisers looking to support legitimate journalism,” said Kelsey Garigan, Zefr’s EVP of North American Sales. “By combining NewsGuard’s scale and rigor with Zefr’s patented video technology, we’re now able to offer brands additional brand suitable investment opportunities for video.”
“We’re grateful that so many brands have started to take action on this issue — though much work is still yet to be done because of the absence of effective responsible marketing tools before now,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard. “This new partnership will enable socially responsible companies to have an even greater impact on the effort to fund and support legitimate and trustworthy publishers and journalists, rather than blocking their revenue. We’re looking forward to working with Zefr on this critical issue.”
To start using Zefr’s new NewsGuard-powered inclusion lists, get in touch today. To learn more about NewsGuard’s broader brand safety offering, BrandGuard, click here.
About NewsGuard
Launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides credibility ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information sources. NewsGuard rates all the news and information sources that account for 95% of online engagement across the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and Italy.
NewsGuard’s ratings are conducted by trained journalists using nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a news source repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. Based on the criteria, each source receives an overall trust rating, a trust score of 0-100, a score on each of the nine criteria, and a detailed “Nutrition Label” explaining the rating and providing examples of the site’s editorial practices. Advertisers, advertising agencies and advertising tech companies license NewsGuard’s ratings to direct their programmatic advertising toward legitimate journalism and avoid misinformation. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.
About Zefr
Zefr is the leading data company that enables responsible marketing for brands, agencies and platforms. Zefr’s data and media solutions put brands in control of their content adjacency in video, based on brand and industry standards, including the Global Alliance of Responsible Media (GARM) suitability standards. As an official YouTube Measurement Partner and Facebook Marketing Partner, the company leverages patented Human-in-the-Loop technology to offer brands and agencies more accurate and transparent activation and verification solutions on scaled video platforms. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with offices in New York, Chicago, London, Spain, Dubai and Sweden. For more information, go to: http://zefr.com.
NewsGuard Contacts
- Steven Brill, Co-CEO, steven.brill@newsguardtech.com, +1 212 332 6301
- Gordon Crovitz, Co-CEO, gordon.crovitz@newsguardtech.com, +1 212 332 6407
Zefr Contacts
- Andrew Serby, EVP Marketing, andrew.serby@zefr.com