Defense contractor enters media space

Palantir, built on government contracts with the Defense Department and ICE, is now selling data analytics to media and marketing firms through major partnerships.

Major media deals in 2025

Fox News Digital, Zeta Global, Stagwell, and USA Today Co. have all signed partnerships with Palantir in recent months to build internal data platforms.

Union workers raise red flags

More than 800 USA Today Co. employees across 31 unionized newsrooms urged the company to end its Palantir partnership, citing concerns over reader trust, data security, and editorial independence.

Reputation risk didn't deter deals

Despite Palantir's polarizing history with surveillance technology, media executives saw the company's data capabilities as essential and moved forward with partnerships.

“There was no concern about reputation risk. We believe in Palantir and what it's doing.”

Media sits on fragmented data

Zeta works with 550 million opted-in individuals and handles over 7,500 computations per millisecond. Stagwell's datasets span 1 billion touchpoints and 140 million U.S. households.

Palantir's ontology organizes chaos

Palantir pitches an ontology, a single organized model of a company's data that people and AI systems can query. This became far more valuable once large language models arrived.

LLMs unlock unstructured data

Before large language models, the world spent roughly one trillion dollars trying to create structured data. Now AI can reason with unstructured data like campaign briefs and brand insights.

“When LLMs came out, all of a sudden you could reason with unstructured data.”

Marketing's holy grail becomes possible

Palantir enables marketers to answer specific questions on demand, like identifying which customers want back-to-school merchandise and live near a store.

USA Today chases anonymous visitors

USA Today Co. wants to turn anonymous visitors into known relationships it can monetize, converting attention signals into actionable intelligence for faster monetization.

Speed is the competitive advantage

Stagwell built a working agentic marketing system in 16 weeks. Zeta rebuilt its entire data cloud on Palantir's Foundry platform after a test so convincing it skipped competitive review.

“We tested its product and found it superior. It was so good that we didn't even go out and run a big bake-off.”

Forward-deployed engineers embed with teams

Palantir embeds engineers directly with clients who observe workflows before building solutions. At Fox News Digital, engineers shadowed the newsroom before creating anything.

Fox News builds Newsroom platform

Palantir's embedded engineers built Newsroom, which handles a dozen tasks after article writing like suggesting video, links, photos, and tags. It now assists in 95% of Fox News Digital's articles.

“They didn't just come in and advise. They came in and built something with us that will endure over time.”

Palantir stays agnostic to AI models

Foundry sits between data and whichever AI model works best for a task, letting companies work across Azure, Google, and other clouds without being locked into one LLM.

“We want to be agnostic to the LLM. That is what the ontology gives us.”

Fox News uses multiple AI tools

Fox News Digital uses ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Cursor, but Palantir serves a different purpose by industrializing operations rather than functioning as individual tools.

Palantir becomes a sales channel

Zeta and Stagwell have seven-year and ongoing partnerships where Palantir takes a percentage of revenue on deals they close, while they gain access to Palantir's 600-plus commercial clients.

“We ended up with seven because we wanted 10 and they wanted five.”

Mutual learning across industries

As Palantir expands into shipping logistics and healthcare, it learns from partners like Stagwell about unfamiliar industries, creating a symbiotic relationship that benefits both sides.

Fox News owns Newsroom after deal

Unlike longer-term partnerships, Fox News Digital's commercial relationship with Palantir ended after Newsroom was completed, with Fox News now owning the platform outright.