Ad Fontes Media uses Zenlytic to scale analytics with self-serve BI

Ad Fontes Media is dedicated to evaluating news sources for bias and reliability, providing valuable insights to consumers seeking balanced perspectives. The organization's Media Bias Chart is widely used to provide actionable data for advertisers, publishers, and tech platform and media literacy tools for educators and individuals.

Ad Fontes Media faced challenges in analyzing large volumes of media data to help people know the reliability and bias of the news. By partnering with Zenlytic, a software company building the first self-serve business intelligence platform, Ad Fontes Media was able to increase productivity of the data team so they could deliver more precise insights to its customers, faster, without having to hire more team members.

Challenges:

• Data Overload: Ad Fontes Media needed to process and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources due to the exponential growth of digital media.
• Combining Manual Input with Automated Input: As Ad Fontes grew from scoring articles manually to adding automated model scoring capabilities, it needed ways to organize its ever-growing data.
• Scalability Issues: The organization struggled to scale its operations effectively to meet growing demand for insights on its own media rating data. 
• Data Storage and Processing: Required a larger datastore to manage the data efficiently, MySQL was working but hitting limits. 

Solution: Ad Fontes Media implemented Zenlytic to leverage its self-serve analytics and AI capabilities. With the cognitive layer and Zoë, the AI data analyst, from Zenlytic, Ad Fontes saw the following benefits:

• AI Powered Insights: When employees have questions about Ad Fontes data, they no longer interrupt the data team, but ask Zoë from Zenlytic. More than a chatbot or text-to-SQL, Zoë is a data agent with access to the full suite of data tooling in the Zenlytic platform.
• Time for Impactful Work: The data team was freed up to work on optimizing their algorithms to assess media bias and reliability, providing more accurate and consistent evaluations.
• Scalable Infrastructure: Ad Fontes moved from MySQL and custom scripts to a data stack of Airbyte, Google BigQuery, dbt, and Zenlytic. With the ability to work with any structured data, Zenlytic's scalable infrastructure enabled Ad Fontes Media to analyze increasing volumes of data without compromising performance.
• Cost-Effective Solutions: The pricing was competitive and the reports and dashboards were flexible, meeting and exceeding Ad Fontes Media's requirements.

Data Stack

Implementation: Don Hussen, the CTO of Ad Fontes Media, spearheaded the implementation, following a structured process:

1. Assess: Zenlytic conducted a thorough assessment of Ad Fontes Media’s requirements, identifying specific areas where AI and data analytics could provide the most value.
2. Data Integration: The Zenlytic team worked closely with Ad Fontes Media to integrate their data sources into the Zenlytic platform, ensuring seamless data flow and compatibility.
3. Customization: Every company's data is unique. Ad Fontes built their cognitive model to represent their unique data, metrics, and definitions. 
4. Training and Support: Zenlytic provided comprehensive training and ongoing support to ensure Ad Fontes Media’s team could effectively utilize the new tools and features.‍

Roadblocks and Solutions: During the implementation, Ad Fontes Media faced several roadblocks, which Zenlytic helped overcome:

• Complex Data Models: Zenlytic's intuitive data model interface and integration with Git allowed Ad Fontes Media to work in development environments before pushing to production, ensuring a smooth transition.
• Interface Adaptation: Initially using custom scripts, Ad Fontes Media transitioned to utilizing Zenlytic’s table views and joins view, simplifying the setup and validation of data joins.

Results:

• Increased Efficiency: Automation of data processing reduced analysis time by 70%, allowing Ad Fontes Media to focus on data problems that add value to customers.
• Enhanced Accuracy: AI-driven answers helped the Ad Fontes team get better inputs for their  bias and reliability assessments
• Scalability: Through end-user adoption, Ad Fontes has scaled its operations to meet growing demand, analyzing more articles and producing more frequent updates to its ad-tech partners
• Improved User Experience: Enhanced accuracy and frequency of updates improved user trust and engagement with Ad Fontes data.
• Productivity Gains: The platform saved Ad Fontes Media from hiring 1-2 additional data science resources, enabling their team of five data scientists to respond to 40,000 customer queries per second more efficiently.

The partnership between Zenlytic and Ad Fontes Media exemplifies how leveraging self-serve data analytics and AI can address significant operational challenges. By automating and enhancing the evaluation of media bias, Zenlytic enabled Ad Fontes Media to deliver more reliable and unbiased insights, reinforcing its position as a trusted source in the media industry.