Semasio and NewsGuard partner to protect brands from ad placements on misinformation
New integration makes it easy for advertisers to exclude misinformation sites from ad buys—and to target ad spend toward credible domains vetted by NewsGuard’s team of expert journalists
(New York, August 25, 2022) Semasio, a pioneer in unified contextual targeting for advertisers, and NewsGuard, the leading provider of news inventory credibility ratings for advertisers, today announced a partnership that will make it easy and seamless for brands to avoid ad placements on misinformation sources—and to direct ad spend toward credible news sites, including highly trusted local and regional publishers.
Through the partnership, brands will be able to activate a set of contextual segments curated based on data from NewsGuard’s team of expert journalists, who assess the credibility of thousands of news and information sources using nine basic, apolitical journalistic criteria, flagging publishers that fail to meet basic journalistic standards.
For example, brands using Semasio can additionally enable pre-bid suppression ad placements on sites NewsGuard has flagged for publishing anti-vaccine misinformation, election integrity hoaxes, Russia-Ukraine war disinformation, or other categories of false or unreliable news.
In addition to protecting brands via the NewsGuard exclusion list against their programmatic advertising unintentionally supporting misinformation, NewsGuard’s inclusion list enables advertisers to make more efficient purchases of programmatic advertising. A leading case study showed that an advertiser achieved a nine percent reduction in advertising cost (CPM) and a more than doubling of engagement by removing misinformation sites and instead delivering ads on high-quality news sites, including those serving local, Black, Hispanic, Asian and LGBTQ+ communities,
“Semasio ensures that our clients have the data necessary to reach high-quality audiences in high-quality contexts,” said Steve Katelman, Chief Partnership Officer at Semasio’s parent company, Fyllo “This partnership between Semasio and Newsguard only further solidifies our commitment to helping clients advertise on highly performing responsible news sources of all sizes while avoiding brand risk from misinformation.”
Globally, an estimated $2.6 billion is spent placing advertisements on misinformation and disinformation websites each year, according to a report released by Comscore using NewsGuard’s data last year. Many of those ad placements are unintentional and are made without brands’ knowledge. Through the solution offered by NewsGuard and Semasio, brands will be able to avoid inadvertently financing mis- and disinformation and instead target their ads toward credible news.
“Whenever we speak with brands or account teams at our agency partners, it’s clear that they are eager to avoid placing ads on misinformation sites—and they’re looking for simple and seamless ways to exclude such sites when activating their campaigns and instead to focus on those publishers that are most credible and effective” said Gordon Crovitz, Co-CEO of NewsGuard. “Through this partnership with Semasio, brands will have a simple way to do so using Semasio’s innovative contextual targeting technology.”
The NewsGuard segments are expected to launch within the Semasio platform in Q3 of this year. Brands, agencies, and others interested in learning more about the solution may contact NewsGuard here.
About Semasio
Semasio, now part of Fyllo, is a pioneer in unified contextual targeting for digital marketing, enabling marketers to seamlessly combine audience, contextual and brand fit solutions into one targeting strategy, both on the buy and the sell side. Founded in Hamburg in 2010, today the company is active in 50 countries and its semantic analysis engine supports more than 30 languages. Learn more at www.semasio.com.
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 websites. NewsGuard rates all the news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, and Italy and will launch in Austria, Australia and New Zealand later this year. NewsGuard products include NewsGuard ratings for news consumers, BrandGuard protections for advertisers and the Misinformation Fingerprints catalog of top hoaxes to counter disinformation operations.
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 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 advertising toward legitimate journalism and avoid misinformation.
For more information, including how to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.