IRVINE, Calif.—Viant Technology Inc. has announced a new partnership with Ad Fontes Media, the news ratings data and technology company, that will make it the first and only DSP to enable news reliability-based targeting within news inventory on connected TVs.
The integration is designed to address the potential problems facing advertisers who are increasingly worried about associating their campaigns with news content that may upset some consumers in a highly polarized political environment. That dynamic has caused some to pull back from making buys with news outlets.
"Advertisers don't need to avoid news, but they do need better tools to navigate it," said Vanessa Otero, founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media. "This partnership with Viant gives advertisers a consistent, data-driven way to evaluate content quality. And because our analysis can extend beyond the domain or app level to content as it goes live, advertisers gain a more granular way to target trusted news environments."
To address that issue, Viant and Ad Fontes pair premium inventory access with the content-level intelligence needed to activate it with confidence and precision.
In announcing the offering, Viant said that Ad Fontes Media has built its reputation helping major brands navigate news content with confidence.
"We use Ad Fontes Media to ensure our advertising reaches all audiences across the political spectrum because we make cars for everyone," said Shenan Reed, global chief media officer at General Motors. "Ad Fontes Media also helps ensure that those ads show up in reliable publications."
News audiences are among the most attentive and engaged in advertising, yet the category remains one of the most avoided.
Viant noted that brands pulling back are leaving measurable performance on the table: ads in news environments receive 20% more attention and drive 77% higher brand recall, according to a recent study from Teads and Lumen Research.
With 2026 on track to be the most expensive midterm cycle in U.S. history, the news environment has never been more crowded, more contested, or more consequential for brands trying to navigate it.
By integrating Ad Fontes Media's Reliability and Bias framework directly into the Viant advertising platform, advertisers can now identify and activate against trusted news programming at the content level, connecting that investment directly to real household-level outcomes.
Brands leveraging Ad Fontes' high-quality inventory, which excludes low-quality news through AI-powered segments, typically achieve approximately 60% lower Cost Per Acquisition and 50%+ higher conversion rates within contextually aligned environments.
The partnership directly addresses a persistent problem in programmatic advertising. Brands have long been forced to navigate a market cluttered with made-for-advertising sites, downstream resold inventory, and low-quality content mislabeled as news, leading many to pull back from the category entirely and leaving high-quality, trusted news environments underutilized and underpriced.
"Through Viant's partnership with Ad Fontes, advertisers can reach the most relevant audiences while ensuring their ads appear in trusted, high-quality news environments. This puts premium supply back to work at scale. For brands that have been sitting on the sidelines of news, the calculus has changed," said Richie Hyden, senior vice president of publisher solutions at Viant.
The integration is now available within the Viant ad platform, with activation spanning live news programming across leading CTV publishers.
More information is available at viantinc.com.
