Everything You Know About News Advertising Is Wrong

In recent years, news has never been more in demand—or more misunderstood by advertisers.

As the war with Iran escalates and as AI-generated content makes it difficult to tell fact from fiction on social media, audiences are turning to trusted news sources, creating an unprecedented opportunity in premium, high-intent environments that drive efficient performance and brand growth. 

Yet at the very moment when news consumption is surging, many brands continue what Stagwell Chairman and CEO Mark Penn has correctly labeled an “unintentional boycott”—the slow, systematic draining of ad dollars from news, driven by unfounded brand safety fears.

Stagwell’s 2025 Advertising Impact Study found that 57% of self-described news junkies—roughly 25% of the U.S. population—are following the news more closely than before. They check the news an average of 25 times per day and read seven articles daily. But this isn’t just a news-junkie phenomenon: 43% of the broader U.S. population reports consuming more news than a year ago.

This is not idle scrolling. Traditional news content generates significantly longer time on page than soft news, meaning more seconds where ads are actually in view. Eye-tracking work from Teads and Lumen shows that higher interest in traditional news yields roughly 20% more ad-attention seconds than softer content and produces a 77% lift in brand recall. 

In a performance-obsessed market, news has become one of the few remaining environments where people are actively leaning in, not swiping past.

For years, blunt keyword blocklists have treated words like “war,” “Iran,” and “election” as radioactive without regard for context, starving quality publishers of revenue and pushing brands into lower-quality environments. 

The brand-safety rationale doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Stagwell’s Future of News research, conducted with nearly 50,000 U.S. adults, found that ads adjacent to hard-news stories—covering the Middle East, crime, Trump, Biden, and inflation—performed on par with ads next to “brand safe” business, sports, and entertainment content across purchase intent, favorability, and eight core reputation metrics. The studies have since been replicated in the U.K., Asia-Pacific, and Germany, with identical results.

Consumers, in fact, respond positively to brands that show up alongside news. The IAB’s News Trust Halo study found that 84% of consumers say their trust in a brand stays the same or increases when they see its ads alongside news, and 90% react positively or neutrally.

Nearly half of respondents said brands advertising in news felt more customer-focused, more innovative, and more relevant—and 45% said they’d be more likely to visit that brand’s website. 

In a fragmented media landscape, news is one of the few remaining mass-reach plays—and it reaches people other channels miss entirely. Stagwell’s research found that “exclusive news junkies”—Americans who follow news closely but not sports or entertainment—have grown from 11.1% to 13.8% of U.S. adults in just over a year, bringing the total to approximately 80.4 million people. This 14% of U.S. adults cannot be reached by paid advertising anywhere outside of news.

This audience is also disproportionately valuable: Gen X (64% vs. 58% of the general population), college-educated (51% vs. 38%), fully employed (46% vs. 40%), and six-figure earners (37% vs. 28%). They are the high-income, high-influence consumers brands say they want but often chase in less accountable channels. Reallocating even a portion of tentpole TV, CTV, or creator budgets into a sustained news presence buys access to a genuinely unduplicated audience without sacrificing scale.

Performance marketers have quietly been proving what brand marketers are still debating: news works. Case studies from Ad Fontes Media, executed with The Trade Desk and its News Navigator platform, show that shifting budget into high-quality, low-bias news environments consistently reduces customer acquisition costs and improves ROAS.

For a major Hollywood studio, a curated news segment across display and CTV delivered a 23% lower CPA versus benchmarks on display, a 41% lower CPA and 34% lower CPM on CTV, and a 50% higher conversion rate overall. A financial services marketer using the same Ad Fontes-qualified inventory saw CPMs come in 31% below forecast, overall CPA 60% below benchmark, and 78% viewability—results strong enough to justify a 25% budget increase the following quarter. 

Stagwell’s own news-focused campaigns have delivered 3x the average ROAS, and Assembly’s Media Mix Model showed news driving 136% transaction growth for one global logistics client.

For CMOs juggling performance pressure and brand stewardship, news is not a risky edge case—it is an underpriced, under-allocated channel for driving growth. Rebalancing plans to include a deliberate, always-on news layer allows brands to meet unduplicated audiences where their attention actually is, while lowering acquisition costs and strengthening the journalism that keeps those audiences engaged.