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.
News is a premium attention environment
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.
Brand safety fears around news are outdated
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.
News delivers unduplicated, high-value reach at scale
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.
