Long known for building its foundational business on defense contracts, government intelligence, and immigration enforcement, data analytics giant Palantir is carving out a powerful new frontier in the media and marketing industries. Despite a polarizing corporate reputation that draws fierce criticism from detractors over surveillance technologies—even as supporters champion its advanced AI and defense capabilities—major publishing houses, streaming networks, and advertising holding companies are eagerly inviting the firm into their core operations.
Over the past year, a wave of high-profile partnerships has quietly reshaped the landscape where journalism meets enterprise data analytics. In December 2025, Fox News Digital forged an agreement with Palantir to construct the internal platform that now supports the production of the vast majority of its digital articles. Months later, Zeta Global inked a seven-year strategic partnership, while marketing giant Stagwell successfully built two distinct marketing products on Palantir’s platform. By August, USA Today Co. announced its own transformative deal designed to radically overhaul how the publisher analyzes and monetizes its expansive audience data.
These rapid-fire integrations have not occurred without friction. The partnership between USA Today Co. and Palantir sparked immediate internal backlash, drawing intense scrutiny from more than 800 employees across 31 unionized newsrooms. These journalists urged company leadership to sever ties, raising deep-seated concerns regarding reader trust, data security, and the preservation of editorial independence.
Yet, for the executive leadership orchestrating these multi-million-dollar alliances, Palantir’s controversial public standing played virtually no role in their decision-making calculus.
"There was no concern about reputation risk," said Stagwell chairman and CEO Mark Penn. "We believe in Palantir and what it’s doing."
For corporate executives steering media and marketing firms through a period of profound economic disruption, the core calculus came down to operational velocity, computational power, and strategic market access. What Palantir could achieve with fragmented corporate data, how rapidly it could execute deployments, and which prospective customers it could bring to the table ultimately made the definitive case for cooperation. For Palantir, these alliances provide an invaluable vehicle to learn, infiltrate, and ally with key players in the advertising ecosystem—marking a critical milestone in the intelligence firm’s broader commercial strategy to expand deeply into commercial data markets, as Penn noted. Palantir declined to respond to requests for comment regarding its growing footprint in the media sector.
Making Sense of Massive Data
Modern media and marketing companies are grappling with an unprecedented challenge: sitting atop enormous, highly fragmented mountains of data that defy easy organization.
The scale of this information is staggering. Zeta Global, for instance, works directly with 550 million opted-in individuals and processes more than 7,500 computations per millisecond during peak operational seasons, according to CEO David Steinberg. Meanwhile, Stagwell’s sprawling data sets span one billion distinct touchpoints and 140 million U.S. households, noted John Kahan, the holding company’s chief AI officer and former chief data and analytics officer at Microsoft.
To help corporate enterprises make sense of these vast, disparate data troves, Palantir deploys what it defines as an "ontology." According to Kahan, an ontology acts as a single, highly organized model of a company’s underlying data and operational workflows that human employees and artificial intelligence systems can seamlessly query and act upon. This specific architectural capability experienced a quantum leap in value with the widespread commercial arrival of large language models.
"The world spent probably $1 trillion trying to create structured data," Kahan observed. "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."
This technological foundation allowed Stagwell to edge significantly closer to what Mark Penn describes as "the holy grail of marketing"—the capacity to answer hyper-specific, complex questions on demand rather than relying on legacy demographic approximations.
"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?" Penn explained.
For USA Today Co., the impetus behind the partnership stems from an urgent, existential industry reality: declining search traffic. As traditional referral traffic dwindles, the publisher aims to systematically transform anonymous digital visitors into known, authenticated relationships that can be monetized more effectively—a strategic pivot laid out by CEO Mike Reed during an investor call.
"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."
Industry analysts view these maneuvers as indicative of a broader, structural transformation sweeping across the publishing sector. David Clinch, co-founder of Media Growth Partners, notes that traditional publishing business models are under severe strain.
"Media needs new forms of revenue, but also needs better forms of revenue," Clinch 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
A recurring theme cited by executives across all partnering firms is Palantir’s ability to accelerate digital transformation at a pace that traditional internal development teams simply cannot match.
Stagwell successfully developed a working iteration of its agentic marketing system in just 16 weeks, a project born out of an initial trial initiated by a handshake agreement between Mark Penn and Palantir CEO Alex Karp. At Zeta Global, leadership opted to entirely rebuild its proprietary data cloud on Foundry—Palantir’s flagship commercial platform—after a proof-of-concept test proved so overwhelmingly convincing that the company bypassed a traditional competitive vendor review.
"We tested its product and found it superior," Steinberg said. "It was so good that we didn’t even go out and run a big bake-off."
USA Today’s Mike Reed echoed a similar sentiment to his investors, emphasizing the sheer time-saving utility of the software. "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 noted.
Much of this velocity is credited to Palantir’s distinct deployment model, which relies on "forward-deployed engineers" who physically embed themselves within client offices to build bespoke systems alongside internal staff. All four media and marketing firms utilized these embedded engineers. At Fox News Digital, these specialists spent weeks rigorously shadowing the newsroom before writing a single line of code, 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," Berry explained. "After observing that process, they then go and build digital versions of workflows."
The resulting internal platform, designated simply as "Newsroom," expertly manages the dozen or so administrative and production tasks that immediately follow the composition of an article, such as intelligently suggesting relevant video clips, hyperlink paths, accompanying photography, and targeted metadata tags. The tool now actively assists in the production of 95% of Fox News Digital’s published articles, though leadership maintains that no reader-facing text or journalism is generated autonomously by artificial intelligence.
"They didn’t just come in and advise," Berry added. "They came in and built something with us that will endure over time."
A Layer Above the Models
Beyond raw operational speed, enterprise clients are drawn to Palantir’s structural interoperability, which sets it apart from traditional AI firms tied exclusively to proprietary foundational models.
At Stagwell, Palantir Foundry operates as an agile abstraction layer positioned squarely between internal corporate data repositories and whichever large language model proves most effective for a specific task. This architecture allows the holding company to operate fluidly across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other distributed infrastructure.
"We want to be agnostic to the LLM," Kahan emphasized. "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."
A parallel approach is employed at Fox News Digital. While the network routinely utilizes external tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Cursor, Berry notes that these consumer-facing technologies serve entirely different operational functions than Palantir’s infrastructure.
"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
For marketing giants like Zeta and Stagwell, the relationship with Palantir extends far beyond software licensing into the realm of shared go-to-market sales channels. The depth of this integration is reflected in commercial terms; Steinberg revealed that Zeta’s seven-year contract length was arrived at as a pragmatic compromise.
"We ended up with seven because we wanted 10 and they wanted five," he said.
Under the terms of their arrangement, Palantir collects a percentage of revenue on every commercial deal Zeta successfully closes. In exchange, Zeta gains direct access to Palantir’s vast roster of more than 600 commercial enterprise clients, armed with a pitch designed to slash their overarching marketing expenditures. Stagwell similarly approaches prospective corporate clients side-by-side with Palantir, with its specialized sales efforts directly driving utilization rates of the Foundry platform.
This mutualism transcends purely financial transactions, fostering a reciprocal educational exchange, according to Kahan. As Palantir aggressively scales its enterprise software into highly complex, data-intensive industries such as shipping logistics and healthcare, it benefits immensely from working alongside specialized partners capable of guiding them through the unfamiliar regulatory and operational nuances of those sectors.
"[Palantir] tells us regularly that [advertising] is not an area that they are familiar with," Kahan said. "But they are learning."
