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.
News drives measurable performance
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.
