• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 17, 2023

Night Market, a unit launched by Horizon Media three years ago to specialize in the burgeoning direct-to-consumer (D2C) retail marketplace, this morning announced its own new platform -- Neon -- which utilizes proprietary artificial intelligence that buys media smarter than people can.

How much smarter? According to Horizon's announcement: More than 20%.

"[Neon is] designed to increase advertisers' revenue by 20+% when planning and buying retail media to achieve their maximum revenue outcomes," the agency boasts in a statement unveiling the new unit, adding: "Neon starts with the sale in mind using automated predictive analytics to make investment decisions across retailers."

Specifically, Horizon said the platform's "computing power forecasts to the tactical level and optimizes in-market spend in real-time at the SKU level, citing these explicit capabilities:

• Normalizes relationship between historical MMM ROI, client sales data, and retailer-reported campaign performance data (ROAS) to predict quarterly true ROI.

• Predicts optimal media investment across retailers and 3P channels such as Amazon and Walmart, down to the tactical level to deliver a revenue goal.

• Optimizes in market spend in real time by auto predicting thousands of micro optimizations across retailers or by tactic with a specific retailer to improve true ROI.

• Evolves merchandising of Product Display Pages (PDPs) to predict the conversion the prospect media is sending to the page – this directs media to the client's best performing PDPs across retailers and compared to competitor PDPs within a retailer.