Stagwell buys Freestar, the firm that sells ads for Fortune and the Boston Globe
Stagwell buys Freestar, which sells ads for publishers including Fortune and Boston Globe Media. The firm joins Stagwell Owned Media.
Photo: Jane T D. / Pexels
Stagwell buys Freestar, a company that runs programmatic ad sales for digital publishers, the agency group announced on 26 October 2026. Freestar’s clients include Boston Globe Media, Fortune Media, Legacy and Enthusiast Gaming. Neither side disclosed the price.
Freestar joins Stagwell’s Owned Media unit
David Freedman founded Freestar in 2015, and the company is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Stagwell says it has brought publishers more than $1bn in revenue over the past ten years. Its own software, pubOS, runs ad sales for sites that do not want to build that team themselves.
Freestar will sit in Stagwell’s Owned Media business, led since February by Ben Berentson. According to Axios, that unit already holds travel publisher Ink, airport network ReachTV and RealClear Holdings, the parent of RealClearPolitics. Digiday reports that Ink and ReachTV will move their programmatic sales to Freestar.
Kurt Donnell promises to stay “publisher-first”
Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell told Axios that the deal gives clients new tools while “staying true to the publisher-first approach”. Berentson said publishers are “essential to a healthy media ecosystem”. Stagwell also ties the deal to its Future of News programme, which asks advertisers to spend more on news sites.
Stagwell now sits on both sides of the ad deal
The purchase puts a publisher’s sales partner inside a group that also buys media for brands. Digiday describes this as a possible conflict of interest. Ciaran O’Kane of FirstPartyCapital told Digiday that agencies routing client money through their own tools will have to explain why. An unnamed executive at a global publisher said they see no clear gain for the largest publishers.
The deal continues a year of change at Stagwell, which retired Assembly and launched Stagwell Media. Larger groups are also leaning on media: Omnicom’s media revenue grew more than 10% in the third quarter.
Stagwell gains a direct line to the ad space of hundreds of publishers, plus a sales team for its own media. Rival agency groups lose some neutrality on those sites: when they buy ads there, the seller now belongs to a competitor.