In the taxonomy of corporate suitors, there are those who arrive with flowers and those who arrive with spreadsheets. Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm whose client list once read primarily like the org chart of the federal intelligence apparatus, appears to have shown up at media and marketing companies with both.
The company, which built its original business on contracts with the Defense Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has in recent months assembled a surprisingly robust roster of deals with firms whose business is selling soap, not finding spies. In December, Fox News Digital contracted with Palantir to build the platform that now supports the production of 95 percent of its articles. In June, Zeta Global, the data marketing company, signed a seven-year partnership. Stagwell, the holding company led by Mark Penn, has built two products on the platform. And in August, USA Today Co. announced an arrangement to analyze and monetize its audience data.
That last agreement drew objections from more than 800 employees across 31 unionized newsrooms, who cited concerns about reader trust and editorial independence. But such reservations appear not to have troubled the executives who signed the checks.
"There was no concern about reputation risk," Mr. Penn said. "We believe in Palantir and what it's doing."
What Palantir is doing, at least in part, is helping companies navigate data sets of stupefying size — 550 million opted-in individuals at Zeta, 1 billion touchpoints at Stagwell — using what it calls an "ontology," which is to say a unified model of a company's operations that both humans and AI systems can query. (The word is borrowed from philosophy, where it means something rather more profound.) Several executives cited the arrival of Palantir's "forward-deployed engineers," who embed with client teams and build alongside them, as a meaningful accelerant.
Porter Berry, the president and editor-in-chief of Fox News Digital, said those engineers shadowed reporters and editors before writing any code. "They came in and built something with us that will endure over time," he said.
For Palantir, which did not respond to a request for comment, the partnerships offer entry into the commercial data business — a phrase that makes defense work sound almost quaint. For the media and marketing firms, which sit atop vast, fragmented piles of information they would very much like to monetize before the internet finishes rearranging itself, the appeal is speed.
That, and perhaps a certain lack of alternatives.
Original story published in Adweek: "Palantir's Quiet Takeover of Media's Data Stack"