Palantir built its name on government and defense contracts. Now it is moving deeper into commercial data, and media and marketing firms are becoming a major testbed.
A string of high-profile media deals
Since December 2025, Fox News Digital has used a Palantir-built platform called Newsroom to handle post-writing production tasks and now produces 95% of its articles. In June, Zeta Global signed a seven-year partnership. Stagwell has built two marketing products on Palantir’s platform. In August, USA Today Co. announced a deal to analyze and monetize audience data.
The deals have not been without friction. 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. Yet executives behind the deals told Adweek that reputation risk was not a major concern. Mark Penn, Stagwell chairman and CEO, said: “There was no concern about reputation risk. We believe in Palantir and what it’s doing.”
Why the data pitch is landing
Media and marketing companies sit on 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.
Palantir’s central pitch is an “ontology,” a single organized model of a company’s data and operations that people and AI systems can query and act on. That capability became more valuable once large language models arrived, because teams could reason over unstructured material such as campaign briefs, branding data and brand insights.
The technology let Stagwell move closer to what Penn called “the holy grail of marketing” — answering specific questions on demand, such as which customers want back-to-school merchandise, live near a store, and which brands to sell and when. For USA Today Co., falling search traffic has made it urgent to turn anonymous visitors into known relationships that can be monetized.
Speed, engineers and model flexibility
Executives cited speed as a decisive factor. Stagwell had a working version of its agentic marketing system within 16 weeks. Zeta rebuilt its entire data cloud on Foundry, Palantir’s commercial platform, after a test so convincing that the company skipped a competitive review. USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed told investors that work that could take considerable time internally could be done in weeks or months with Palantir.
Much of that speed comes from forward-deployed engineers who embed with clients and build alongside their staff. At Fox News Digital, engineers shadowed the newsroom before building anything, then created the Newsroom platform that handles tasks such as adding video, links, photos and tags. It now produces 95% of Fox News Digital’s articles, although nothing reader-facing is generated by AI.
Another appeal is interoperability. Stagwell keeps Foundry between its data and whichever AI model works best for a task, working across Azure, Google and other clouds. John Kahan, Stagwell’s chief AI officer, said the goal is to be agnostic to the model: if a new model emerges, Stagwell can switch it. Fox News Digital uses ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini and Cursor, but executives said Palantir’s difference is industrializing the operation rather than offering individual tools.
A partner that brings customers
For Zeta and Stagwell, Palantir is also a sales channel. Palantir takes a percentage of revenue on deals Zeta closes, and Zeta can approach Palantir’s more than 600 commercial clients with a pitch to cut marketing costs. Stagwell likewise goes to clients alongside Palantir. Zeta’s seven-year term was a compromise: CEO David Steinberg said Zeta wanted 10 years and Palantir wanted five.
What marketing leaders should watch
Data infrastructure deals can shrink build time, but they also create governance, privacy and trust obligations. Unionized USA Today newsrooms are a reminder that internal alignment matters as much as technical speed.
- Run a contained pilot before committing to a long-term platform deal.
- Ask whether you can swap models freely or are locked into one AI provider.
- Clarify which customer or revenue relationships the platform partner can access.
- Address reader trust and data security with editorial and privacy teams early.
The broader shift is clear: media and marketing data is becoming a commercial battleground, and platform partners like Palantir are positioning themselves as the operating layer above it.
Source: Adweek
