CASE STUDY / AD FONTES MEDIA
Scaling Smarter: Predictive Article-Level Scoring for Adtech
How Ad Fontes Media achieved article-level scoring at scale via robust data and Machine Learning (ML) pipelines
90,000x faster analysis time per article
89% increase in operational efficiency
2600x increase in articles rated
Substantial revenue streams unlocked
The Client
Ad Fontes Media
Founded in 2018, Ad Fontes Media pioneered the Media Bias Chart®, a trusted resource for understanding political bias and content reliability.
Their solutions help businesses, consumers, educators, and tech platforms navigate today’s complex and dynamic news landscape with actionable data and media literacy tools.
Company size
75 employees
Industry
Media and information services
Tech stack
Fabricks Foundry™, Fabricks Alkemy™, Zenlytic
Ad Fontes Media's Media Bias Chart
Project Overview
The Challenge: Take a Leap on a New Business Opportunity
When Adtech emerged as a high potential vertical, scalability issues prevented Ad Fontes from supplying the real-time, high-volume data that advertisers, publishers, and platforms depend on. Manual processes had created bottlenecks across roles.
Time Consuming
Analysts spent hours scoring articles, line by line, with no mechanism to scale or speed up delivery.
Limited Access
Ad Operations Managers had access only to broad, source-level scores, restricting the precision of campaign decisions.
Insufficient Tech
Engineers faced fragmented scripts and lacked cloud infrastructure to automate workflows.
The Strategy: ML-Powered Workflows
d²l partnered with Ad Fontes to automate article-level scoring, building an end-to-end data and ML pipeline powered by Fabricks Foundry™ and Fabricks Alkemy™, then plugging into Zenlytic, a Business Intelligence (BI) tool, to give stakeholders user-friendly dashboards to provide transparency and oversight.
Visibility
Zenlytic enabled the Ad Fontes team to track accuracy trends, volume distribution, and confidence scores.
"Because of their dedication to building things the right way from the ground up, our data pipeline and infrastructure is robust and scalable, and it allows us to quickly take advantage of new business opportunities."
Vanessa Otero
Founder and CEO
Ad Fontes Media
With d²l as a thought partner, Ad Fontes transformed their manual rating system to an automated, scalable, article-level scoring engine - unlocking efficiency, granularity, and new market opportunities.
Impacts and Outcomes
Real Changes, Real Value
Ad Fontes underwent a transformation that strengthened the position of its business and redefined how people work to support it.
The result: better data, faster decisions, and more capacity for innovation
Positive Impacts for People
Analyst Augmentation and Empowerment
Once burdened by repetitive manual tasks, analysts are now champions of model quality, finding more time to score additional sources and explore new product opportunities.
Operational Integration
Article ratings are seamlessly integrated into campaign workflows, offering Ad Operations Managers real-time, article-level insights and unlocking granular targeting.
Engineered Reliability
A reproducible, automated pipeline in the cloud frees engineers from ad hoc fixes and manual retraining.
Business Outcomes
Operational Efficiency
Across operations, teams have seen ~89% improvement, processing 50K–100K+ articles daily.
Product Precision
The shift from source-level to article-level scoring has taken product offerings to the next level.
New Market, New Revenue Stream
Adtech integrations have expanded Ad Fontes’s role in the online advertising ecosystem.
Future Growth
The underlying Fabricks framework supports expansion to other media types and markets.
"Working with d²l has allowed us to exponentially increase our data handling and ML modeling capabilities in a surprisingly short amount of time. Their highly professional team delivered a breakthrough result in modeling accuracy of the reliability and bias of news articles that positively altered the course of our business."
Vanessa Otero
Founder and CEO
Ad Fontes Media