The company that built its reputation helping the Defense Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement track things now wants to help marketers track other things — like which customers want back-to-school merchandise and live near a store.
Palantir, the data analytics firm whose government contracts have made it either essential infrastructure or a surveillance concern depending on whom you ask, has been quietly assembling a roster of media and marketing clients. Fox News Digital signed on in December to build an internal platform supporting most of its article production. Zeta Global, the marketing technology company, agreed to a seven-year partnership in June. Stagwell, the holding company led by Mark Penn, has built two marketing products on Palantir's platform. And in August, USA Today Co. announced a deal to analyze and monetize its audience data.
That last partnership drew objections from more than 800 employees across 31 unionized newsrooms, who cited concerns about reader trust and editorial independence. But the executives behind these deals said Palantir's polarizing reputation was not a significant factor in their decisions.
"There was no concern about reputation risk," Mr. Penn said. "We believe in Palantir and what it's doing."
(One imagines the procurement meetings were brisk.)
What Palantir offers, according to the executives, is speed and a system for organizing the enormous, fragmented data sets that media and marketing companies have accumulated. John Kahan, Stagwell's chief AI officer, said Palantir pitches what it calls an "ontology" — a single organized model of a company's data that both people and artificial intelligence systems can query.
Mr. Kahan, who previously served as chief data and analytics officer at Microsoft, said the arrival of large language models made that capability far more valuable. "The world spent probably $1 trillion trying to create structured data," he said. "When L.L.M.s came out, all of a sudden you could reason with unstructured data."
Stagwell had a working version of its marketing system within 16 weeks. Zeta rebuilt its entire data cloud on Palantir's platform after a test so convincing it skipped a competitive review. "It was so good that we didn't even go out and run a big bake-off," said David Steinberg, Zeta's chief executive.
For Palantir, the partnerships represent an expansion into what Mr. Penn called "commercial data" — a phrase that sounds rather more pleasant than some of the company's earlier lines of work.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Palantir's Quiet Takeover of Media's Data Stack"