This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.
Palantir built its original business on government work, including contracts with the Defense Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But in recent years, the data analytics company has also begun selling to media and marketing firms.
In December 2025, Fox News Digital struck a deal with Palantir to build the internal platform that now supports the production of the vast majority of its articles. In June, Zeta Global signed a seven-year partnership with Palantir, and Stagwell has built two marketing products on its platform. And in August, USA Today Co. announced a deal that would let it analyze and monetize its audience data.
Some of the deals have drawn scrutiny. More than 800 USA Today Co. employees across 31 unionized newsrooms urged the company to end its partnership, citing concerns over reader trust, data security, and editorial independence.
But Palantir’s polarizing reputation—supporters view its defense tech and AI capabilities as essential, while detractors take issue with its surveillance tech, among others—did not weigh heavily on the executives behind these deals.
“There was no concern about reputation risk,” said Stagwell chairman and CEO Mark Penn. “We believe in Palantir and what it’s doing.”
For executives at the media and marketing firms, what Palantir could do with their data, how quickly it could do it, and, in some cases, which customers it could bring along ultimately made the case for the partnerships.
For Palantir, the tie-ups have enabled the company to learn, enter, and ally itself with key figures in the advertising space, part of a larger strategy for the intelligence firm to expand its business into “commercial data” more broadly, per Penn.
Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.
Making sense of massive data
Media and marketing companies sit on enormous amounts of fragmented data.
Zeta works with 550 million opted-in individuals and, at peak season, handles more than 7,500 computations per millisecond, according to CEO David Steinberg. Stagwell’s data sets span 1 billion touchpoints and 140 million U.S. households, according to John Kahan, its chief AI officer, who previously served as the chief data and analytics officer at Microsoft.
To make sense of these vast troves of data, Palantir pitches what it calls an “ontology,” according to Kahan, a single, organized model of a company’s data and operations that people and AI systems can query and act on. That capability became far more valuable once large language models arrived, according to Kahan.
“The world spent probably $1 trillion trying to create structured data,” Kahan said. “When LLMs came out, all of a sudden you could reason with unstructured data. Now you can go against all of that: campaign briefs, branding data, brand insights.”
The technology enabled Stagwell to move closer to what Penn calls “the holy grail of marketing,” an ability to answer very specific questions on demand.
“I want to turn around and be able to say: Which customers want back-to-school merchandise, live near our store, which brands should we sell, and when?” said Penn.
For USA Today Co., the urgency comes from falling search traffic. The company wants to turn anonymous visitors into known relationships it can monetize, a strategy CEO Mike Reed laid out on its investor call in August.
“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed said. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”
That need reflects a broader shift in the industry, according to David Clinch, co-founder of Media Growth Partners.
“Media needs new forms of revenue, but also needs better forms of revenue,” he said. “This kind of deal could be a better version of legacy data brokering, or it could offer a much greater scale of data ingestion than the media industry has accessed before.”
Speed, with engineers in the room
Palantir enables media and marketing companies to move faster than they could on their own, according to all five executives.
Stagwell had a working version of its agentic marketing system within 16 weeks, built during a trial that began on a handshake between Penn and Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Zeta rebuilt its entire data cloud on Foundry, Palantir’s commercial platform, after a test so convincing that Zeta skipped a competitive review, according to Steinberg.
“We tested its product and found it superior,” he said. “It was so good that we didn’t even go out and run a big bake-off.”
USA Today’s Reed made a similar case to investors.
“What may take us a considerable amount of time to build internally, we can do in a matter of weeks or months with Palantir,” he said.
Much of that speed comes from what Palantir calls its forward-deployed engineers, who embed with clients and build alongside their staff. All four firms used forward-deployed engineers. At Fox News Digital, those engineers shadowed the newsroom before building anything, according to Fox News Digital president and editor-in-chief Porter Berry.
“The forward-deployed engineer sits with the reporter who writes the piece and sees the editor who chooses the photo,” he said. “After observing that process, they then go and build digital versions of workflows.”
The resulting platform, called Newsroom, handles the dozen or so tasks that follow the writing of an article, such as suggesting video, links, photos, and tags. It now assists in the production of 95% of Fox News Digital’s articles, although nothing reader-facing is generated by AI.
“They didn’t just come in and advise,” Berry said. “They came in and built something with us that will endure over time.”
A layer above the models
Another key appeal of Palantir is its interoperability, which differentiates it from many of the other AI firms that have models of their own, according to Kahan.
At Stagwell, Foundry sits between its data and whichever AI model works best for a given task, letting it work across Azure, Google, and other clouds.
“We want to be agnostic to the LLM,” Kahan said. “That is what the ontology gives us: the ability to take that data, integrate it, and reason over it. If someone comes out with a new model, we switch the model.”
Similarly, Fox News Digital uses ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Cursor, but those tools serve a different purpose than Palantir, according to Berry.
“What makes Palantir different from [other AI products], which are individual tools, is that we are able to industrialize our operation, the way we do our work,” he said.
A partner that brings customers
The duration of Palantir partnerships can vary. At Fox News Digital, for instance, the two ended their commercial partnership following the completion of Newsroom, which Fox News now owns, according to Berry.
For Zeta and Stagwell, Palantir is also a sales channel. In fact, Zeta’s seven-year term was a compromise, according to Steinberg.
“We ended up with seven because we wanted 10 and they wanted five,” he said.
Palantir takes a percentage of revenue on every deal Zeta closes. In return, Zeta can approach Palantir’s commercial clients, which number more than 600 per Steinberg, with a pitch to cut their marketing costs. Stagwell likewise goes to clients alongside Palantir, and its sales drive usage of Foundry.
This mutualism extends beyond revenue into education, according to Kahan. As Palantir grows its business into other data-intensive industries, such as shipping logistics and healthcare, it benefits from working alongside a partner that can help it navigate the unfamiliar nuances of those spaces.
“[Palantir] tells us regularly that [advertising] is not an area that they are familiar with,” Kahan said. “But they are learning.”
Talking Heds
The Times’ Advertising Annals (EXCLUSIVE): The New York Times celebrated its 175th anniversary on Friday, having originally launched on Sept. 18, 1851. To commemorate the occasion, the news publisher paid tribute to some of the brands that have advertised in the paper dating back to its earliest days. To do so, it ran a multipage print campaign, which was amplified across its standard channels, highlighting seven ads that both showcase the evolution of advertising since 1851 and mark key historical moments. Included in the spread are an 1851 text-only ad from Tiffany, a 1909 from Ford promoting its $850 Roadster, a 1994 Delta ad debuting its smokefree cabins, and a 1998 E*Trade ad assuring readers that it was safe to move money on the internet. To help me better understand the print product itself, The Times even invited me on a guided tour of its printing facilities in Queens, New York. We turned the campaign, as well as the tour, into a visually rich social video, which you can watch here.
CMO Row: In just the last week, three separate media and creator brands named new chief marketing officers. On Monday, Puck named Jenna Winchell, who previously ran marketing at The Athletic, as its new CMO, replacing Stacy Eisner, who held the role beforehand. The user-generated publisher Fandom also named a spate of new executive hires, including a new CMO, Peter Scanlon, while Patreon has promoted its former senior vice president of marketing, Mike McGarry, to be its first CMO. Reports of the death of the CMO have, apparently, been greatly exaggerated.
Realtor Repast: Next month, I’ll be hosting a private lunch during Advertising Week for telecommunications leaders on Oct. 7. The event will be hosted in partnership with Realtor.com, and the conversation will center around the unique opportunity that phases of disruption—moving, specifically—present to brands. I have partnered with the folks at Realtor a few times now, and in each instance have found the subject matter—the housing market, generational wealth, the psychological heft of relocation—immensely fascinating. If you’re interested in joining me, please reach out to liz@adweek.com.
Taboola Moola: In August, as I scooped, the marketing firm Taboola quietly acquired the creator business developed by rival affiliate platform Howl. Apparently that purchase was just a prelude, because on Friday Taboola also picked up the U.K. affiliate firm Dianomi for around $25 million, the company revealed in a financial filing. The two quick transactions come as the open web, where Taboola has traditionally operated, continues to contract, prompting the company to both strengthen its dominance in lucrative sectors—Dianomi offers affiliate links for financial products, specifically—as well as diversify into emerging areas, which it has accomplished by bolstering its creator division.
1440 Flourishes: The general interest publisher 1440, which began as a daily newsletter, continues its expansion into adjacent products, implementing the same playbook that others, like Morning Brew, Front Office Sports, and Axios, have followed to parlay a dedicated email readership into a broader media empire. As part of this expansion, the publisher announced Wednesday that it has named Julie Shain its new editor in chief, overseeing the flagship Daily Digest newsletter, while former Daily Digest head Sony Kassam has moved into the newly created role of Executive Editor. Such an expansion can come with its own headaches, but 1440 has staked out a clear brand identity, serving as “the knowledge platform for the insatiably curious,” making growth into new channels less troublesome.
Paradium Pairing: The saga of the publisher formerly known as The Arena Group took another unexpected turn last week. On Friday, the company, which implausibly rebranded to Paradium AI in August, plans to sell a 49% equity stake to Roundtable, a company led by former Arena Group cofounder James Heckman. In tandem with the $89 million equity purchase, Roundtable, which operates as a content platform, also struck a 10-year, $1 billion partnership with Paradium. There are two substantial asterisks to the news, however. First, Roundtable still has to raise the $89 million before it can make the purchase, which is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter. And second, the “$1 billion” figure is future-facing, a claim predicated on generating annual revenues of $100 million over the next 10 years. Critically, per Heckman, this deal does not give Roundtable control of Paradium, although Heckman will serve as the chairman of its board. Expect more developments on this front soon.
Quote/Unquote
Jordan Fox is the CEO of Ad Results Media, an audio-first media agency that helps advertisers buy and measure campaigns across podcasts, streaming music, and radio. He joined the agency in 2024 from the agency Laundry Service, a social media and influencer marketing firm, which gave him a fresh lens on the industry, as well as the idea that a podcast has to live on an RSS feed.
Now ARM and its peers are working in a market where top podcasters are multiformat creators with several revenue streams, and where the rights to a single show can be divided among a network, a talent agency, and the host.
This interview has been edited.
Mark Stenberg: The entire podcast industry was in New York last week for the IAB podcast upfronts and Podcast Movement’s fall event. What was everyone talking about?
Jordan Fox: For the past couple of years, the conversation has centered on the realization that podcasts were being consumed in ways beyond audio. When YouTube started growing quickly as a place people watched podcasts, the industry freaked out. What followed was a gradual calming-down as people got used to the medium becoming multiformat. That was always an industry concern, though—consumers do not think about any of this.
Mark: You sound fairly unbothered by that anxiety.
Jordan: I came from social, where the base assumption is that users decide how things go and you follow them. Podcasting is now a mix of walled gardens and open distribution, and social deliverables and live events are becoming important parts of partnerships. People have accepted that. I found a lot of the handwringing about formats to be unproductive anyway, although it did help us in that we got to position ourselves as the agency that was excited about the changes.
Mark: So what is the industry’s big story now?
Jordan: The expanding ecosystem is the central narrative. Measurement continues to be a prominent subject of conversation because for any popular podcast, there’s no way to get central, apples-to-apples data about how it’s consumed. But audiences spending a lot of highly engaged time somewhere with fragmented, imperfect data is true of many forms of media. We see making sense of that data as a place where we can add value.
Mark: How has the work of buying a podcast changed?
Jordan: Things that used to be simple are more complex. In the 1.0 era of podcasts, you went to a production company and did a deal. Now some podcasters are famous people with other lines of business, and the networks don’t always own all the rights. The network may sell host-read ads, while another entity sells its YouTube inventory, someone else sells social, and someone else sells brand ambassadorships.
Mark: Does that change how you describe what ARM is?
Jordan: We talk about “audio-first creators,” because “podcaster” isn’t even a useful term for a lot of the talent we work with now. If you want to do a deal with TBPN, that’s a video-first show. But as an agency, you never want to be an order-taker. The conversation rarely starts with a client saying, “We want you to buy these two podcasts.” It starts with a conversation about their goals, audience profiles, and campaign arcs, and we look at their other media buys before making a recommendation. What we’re doing now are effectively creator partnerships.
Mark: That puts you closer to creator agencies. How do you see that market shaking out?
Jordan: Influencer agencies are bad at navigating this space, which is great, because it allows businesses like mine to exist. But if you asked us for the 30 most relevant TikTokers for a campaign, we wouldn’t be as well equipped to do that. If I’m a brand, that fragmentation is annoying. Long term, you’ll see agencies that can help brands partner with creators anywhere along that spectrum, but I think it will take M&A to get there.
Pulled Quotes
“We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.”
Author Barbara Kingsolver, on the power of literature
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“The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish.”
President Trump, defending his ban of Politico, CNN, and MS NOW
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“In polls, voters register their displeasure with the perception that A.I. is something that is happening to us whether we like it or not.”
The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, on our collective AI problem
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“If the eighth-richest person in the world hadn’t decided his son should get what he wants, Warner Bros. Discovery would have been carved up and the studio sold to Netflix for far less.”
Puck’s Matt Belloni, on the strange fate of the company
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