A gathering of senior media and marketing professionals took aim at one of the ad industry’s most persistent misconceptions: that advertising alongside news is inherently risky.
They argue that a myth holds brands back from an audience they can’t afford to ignore – one characterised by trust, influence and massive engagement.
“Brands and news can partner together to drive incredible business results,” says Alexis Williams, chief corporate affairs officer at Stagwell, a network of 70 marketing companies.
Williams is addressing a panel of media and marketing luminaries at RTL AdAlliance’s RTL Beach at Cannes Lions 2025. She kicks off proceedings by leaving a sentence hanging: “News junkies are…”
Tom Armstrong, VP global advertising at the New York Times, is quick off the mark: “A very attractive audience to market to,” he says.
“They're a huge cohort,” he adds, noting that around 25% of Brits and Americans are news junkies.
With 11.5 million subscribers and 150 million people registered, the New York Times website boasts an audience that is “highly educated, affluent, influential and engaged" and, therefore, “very valuable to marketers.”
Vanessa Otero, chief executive of Ad Fontes Media, says news addicts are information seekers, “which is why ads are so effective on news consumers”.
“They're also good ‘compartmentalisers’, they don't create negative associations between sometimes heavy, difficult news content and the ads.”
Her point resonates with Michele Barlow, managing director and head of global marketing at Bank of America. News junkies are “educated, curious, looking for trusted environments, and looking for those trusted environments to dispel some of the other myths and the misinformation that's out there,” she says.
“But I'll just go to the punchline – news can be a safe environment for advertisers as well.”
‘The most exciting moment for news publishers’
Johanna Mayer-Jones, The Washington Post's global chief advertising officer, believes that publishers are most excited now.
“The thing that we've always had in spades is trusted quality content,” she says. “The demand and the need for that trusted journalism is going to become even more significant, especially as the role of AI-generated content accelerates.”
She points to innovations such as The Post’s large language model-powered Ask the Post AI as proof that publishers are building tools that can advance journalism and partnerships.
“Where we're building, we're innovating, and then we get to bring partners along with us… to be part of that moment of innovation, of reinvention… partners are responding very well to that.”
Ensuring brands are safe
Otero explains that Ad Fontes Media helps advertisers activate programmatically and at scale on high-quality news.
She argues that the content that performs best is reliable and minimally biased. “That's what news junkies are looking for. That's what journalism is.
“No one yells at a brand or boycotts a brand, or anything like that, because their ad ran next to a story covering the wars that are going on right now.”
Brands spending less
Williams references a study by Stagwell that found brands “get a 33% better return on advertising spend” when integrating campaigns with news, thanks to a core audience of “opinion shakers, shapers or signallers”. Advertising next to news is “a no brainer”, she adds.
Yet, Justin Lebbon, co-founder and director of Mediatel Events, observes that “spend across nearly all news organisations, from an advertising perspective, is down.”
Moderating another RTL AdAlliance-hosted panel, he asks Luxottica marketing director for global media, Caroline Proto, why.
“We are spending less, but there’s room for growth,” she says. Today’s news cycle, she argues, can feel too volatile. While she and her team “don’t know for sure” that news adjacency harms the brand, she concedes, “we’d rather go somewhere that we know is safe”.
Gordana Buccisano, global brands strategy director at Reckitt, says the advertiser “went dark” on news last year to avoid political turbulence in the US.
“Risking something that we built really hard for the sake of a couple of seconds of negative exposure would be massive for us,” she says. “So, it's not just a question of budget… it’s very much a question of ensuring that we are actually in the right brand environment.”
While some caution is understandable, Kara Osborne Gladwell, UK and Ireland chief executive at UM London, points to consistent evidence that “brands that advertise around news have double-digit improvements on brand health, trust and the ability for content to really work for them”.
She cites client Moneysupermarket, which ran a successful campaign embedded into the news, even appearing alongside difficult headlines. “It worked because the alignment was right,” she says. “Understanding where your brand is at… and then figuring out how you can make news work for you, is really important.”
A united, simplified path forward
Countering the myth that advertising next to news is inherently risky is paramount for Stéphane Coruble, chief executive of RTL AdAlliance. The company’s RTL Ad Manager tool aims to make trusted news inventory more accessible.
“It’s in line with our strategy of simplifying the access to our inventory,” he says. “In Europe, [the media is] hyper-fragmented. If we have the capability to unite those great pieces of inventory around one offering, it’s a great way forward.
“It’s a tool designed for clients who want to go direct… for agencies that want another option… and for us, as an international sales house, to connect with brands or markets where we don’t have a foot on the ground.”
This is the key takeaway in a fragmented, risk-averse landscape: trusted news needn’t be feared. But it arguably needs to be better connected, more accessible, and above all, understood.