The advertising industry continues to struggle with news environments being too risky for brand safety concerns, leading many marketers to shy away from journalism in favor of “safer” digital spaces.
But, new research is turning that long-held fear on its head. DoubleVerify’s global survey of nearly 2,000 marketing professionals shows that 60% say news inventory actually outperforms their campaign baselines, with only 11% reporting weaker results. Additionally, Stagwell’s Future of News initiative released data showing that ads placed next to topics traditionally considered “unsafe,” such as politics or crime, perform just as effectively as ads placed next to sports or entertainment. In other words, brands may be leaving some of their strongest-performing placements on the table because of outdated fears about adjacency. If adjacency to hard news doesn’t harm outcomes, or even improves them, then it’s time for marketers to rethink their assumptions. Underinvestment in news isn’t protecting brands, it’s limiting reach, wasting efficiency, and starving trusted journalism at the moment it’s needed most.
As we move into 2026, media buyers should have more confidence in using news as the quiet AI restructuring within programmatic takes shape. As practitioners note, AI isn’t arriving with a loud revolution - rather, it is slipping into every layer of the operational workflow. From bidding logic to content evaluation, and even user-behavior prediction. It is powerful and it is more “real-time” than ever before. What once required a media buyer to refresh dashboards all day now happens autonomously. This doesn’t remove the need for human strategy, in fact it amplifies it. AI handles the noise, but people must define the boundaries by setting and refining what signals matter - to what extent - and to which audiences. When they’re right, AI becomes an accelerant for smarter, safer media investment and better performing impressions.
Today’s tools can scan tone, sentiment, visual cues, and contextual signals faster than any human team could manually. But they’re imperfect. AI can misread cues or miss cultural nuance. But remember, the best systems blend machine speed with human oversight. This “duality” matters even more in diverse, multilingual markets where context can shift dramatically from one region to the next. AI gives us the promise to make sounder choices, around the world, as we all try to understand the power and impact of journalism. It’s how people stay informed.