• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 9, 2016

Horizon Media became Blab's first agency partner to use the predictive company's data segments to build real-time conversation-based targeting as part of its programmatic offering, the companies said Wednesday.

Perhaps that's because the advertising agency made a seed investment in a $1 million round of funding in June 2012.

The platform, Blab:Predicts,  lets agencies, brands and publishers use data to drive consumer engagement with campaigns on social sites through what Blab CEO Randy Browning calls conversation-based data segments.

The data comes from signals and consumer chatter gathered on news sites, blog posts, and social networks to build contextual keyword sets and live audience segments. While the technology cannot predict a conversation before it starts, it does curate data segments for targeting audiencesacross search, display, video, mobile, native, and social.

The platform analyzes decisions in real time, and the datasets are built from phrases and words that are not obvious or often used, which means less competition for the bids.

"Granted, there are times people don't compete for a particular keyword because it just sucks," Browning said. "When the words don't suck, they work."

On Valentine's Day, for instance, a brand running a campaign looked at obvious keywords like "date night," "love," and "couples." The keywords Blab discovered leading to conversions were "forever lonely," and "pride, prejudice and zombies."

While the next phase of marketing becomes the ability to "activate audiences in the moment," Browning said Blab's technology can predict what an audience will watch or read up to 72 hours in advance. Now, based on Predictive Social Intelligence, the company claims it can predict consumer locations and target in real time.