Hearst is adopting a new approach to improve ad yield across its news outlets, properties that have historically been difficult to monetize, especially during politically polarized periods.
The publisher of titles such as the San Francisco Chronicle and Connecticut Post has partnered with Mobian to reassess how brand safety and suitability are applied across its local print and television inventory, in a move that seeks to reframe how programmatic buyers classify and price news content.
Under the partnership, Hearst will apply the vendor’s context-based measurement across its dozens of newspapers and digital video news properties — outlets the publisher claims have more than 65% of their audiences return daily.
Hearst continues to work with legacy brand-safety vendors, informing Digiday that it “continues to engage with the verification marketplace” – read working with the market hegemons, such as DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science – “to support partnerships and thought leadership.”
However, the publisher went on to state that, from the news and TV side, “Mobian’s technology is the preferred measurement platform for brand suitability targeting.”
According to Hearst and Mobian’s research, a significant share of Hearst’s inventory has been misclassified as unsafe or unsuitable by existing brand-safety tools, with 38% of its newspaper impressions misclassified by “certain suitability and brand safety providers.”
Ironic outcomes
The two companies assert that this phenomenon has a twofold impact: reducing demand for news inventory (i.e., publisher yield) and increasing overall costs for advertisers’ campaign spend.
Executives at Hearst framed their partnership as an attempt to move beyond blunt keyword-based blocking toward more granular suitability assessments that account for context, sentiment, and editorial framing.
Mobian further claimed that its technology serves as a decision layer that evaluates media environments and creative content together, rather than relying on static labels such as “brand safe” or “not.”
Mobian CEO Jonah Goodhart – a veteran ad tech executive whose career includes cofounding analytics firm Moat, which was sold to Oracle – told Digiday that the legacy approach of some brand-safety vendors created an opportunity for advertisers.
“The irony of all this is that [this is] a result of the demonetization of inventory – in our view, wrongly – by these legacy folks,” he said, referencing Hearst’s audience. “There’s an interesting opportunity – you can actually go and reach highly effective consumers that are paying attention… at a lower price-point than what you might have originally expected.”
Goodhart observed that most advertisers “still buy news,” though this occurs in walled-garden environments such as Meta and TikTok, where they receive less value for money from an audience feedback perspective.
The newly adopted approach elaborates on labelling content simply as “news” – such articles are often blocked by advertisers, especially in a period of highly divisive discussions – by matching content to “personas” that best correlate with a media buyer’s intended outcomes.
The two companies estimate that correcting the earlier “news classifications” could reduce CPMs by up to 27% by easing bid pressure.
A separate analysis of approximately 2.5 billion Hearst Television impressions from the second half of 2025 found that more than 97% ran in safe environments, with over 80% appearing alongside neutral- or positive-sentiment content. Hearst says this data supports its case that local news inventory is routinely penalized despite posing a limited brand-safety risk.
The wider market mood
Michael Irenski, Hearst svp of programmatic strategy, newspapers & TV, spoke of an increasingly widespread acknowledgement of the challenges of the legacy approach to brand safety.
“Advertisers are more open to ad-testing than I’ve ever seen them doing before,” said Irenski, pointing to advancements through technologies that employ AI to enhance the insights they can offer advertisers. “The way we’ve been going to market is … trying to showcase incremental opportunities where they’ve been missing out.”
The announcement lands amid ongoing debate over whether existing brand-safety frameworks — widely adopted by agencies and enforced by verification vendors — systematically disadvantage news publishers.
These shifting sands haven’t gone unnoticed by ad-verification market leaders, with DoubleVerify positioning itself as an “ally” of news publishers at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity last year. Meanwhile, many interpreted IAS’s recent take-private deal as an ideal opportunity to shift its priorities from meeting quarterly revenue targets (under public-market scrutiny) to retooling its offering with a longer-term lens.
Two steps forward…
Matt Prohaska, founder of Prohaska Consulting, has sought to woo advertisers back to investing in “quality news publishers” through the “ProNews Collective,” and told Digiday the emergence of challengers in the brand-safety space from companies such as Mobian and Mantis was having an impact.
However, he observed that most advertisers have largely maintained the “set-and-forget” approach to brand safety since 2024, citing X’s legal actions against the World Federation of Advertisers and the outcome of the U.S. general election that year, despite earlier enthusiasm for increasing their investment in news outlets.
DoubleVerify and IAS have made some changes
Matt Prohaska
Prohaska characterized these simultaneous developments as “two steps forward” followed by “one major step backwards,” adding that outfits such as Google and Meta have (politically) positioned themselves well to benefit in the current climate.
“DoubleVerify and IAS have made some changes to their product positioning and pricing to incentivise buyers to actually use their product more as a scalpel than a sledgehammer,” he said. However, advertisers will need to implement the recently proposed changes to ad measurement if news publishers are to realize the benefits of recent technological developments.
Prohaska further pointed out “the political pressure for agencies.” He cited the years-long consent order that prohibited Omnicom and Interpublic Group from directing ad dollars away from media owners that publish “ideological” content (unless brand clients specifically request it) to avoid having their proposed mega-merger denied, as a reason for advertisers to maintain the majority of their investment with Big Tech.