• by Joe Mandese , August 14, 2024

Amid a rapidly changing identity-based media planning marketplace -- including Google's on-again/off-again cookie plans and Oracle Ads recent shutdown -- Horizon Media is leaning more into contextual targeting and this morning is announcing that it is going with Proximic by Comscore as its "preferred contextual intelligence provider."

While Proximic is not new to the agency, Horizon Senior Vice President of Advanced Video and Agency Partnerships Alexander Stone explains why it is placing more of its planning and buying bets on its research intelligence.

Planning & Buying Insider: Is Proximic new to Horizon, or has Horizon worked with it before?

Alexander Stone: Horizon has been working with ComScore for years in various planning, measurement, and data capacities. When Comscore rolled out Proximic in April 2023, as their new division specifically focused on programmatic targeting and audience creation, it was an organic expansion of our working relationship.

P&BI: What does Proximic enable Horizon to do that it couldn't do before? 

Stone: The predictive audience and contextual products of Proximic allow us to expand advanced audience targeting with precision to drive business outcomes in an ID-free and privacy-centric manner, enabling more high value programmatic inventory to be addressable, such as CTV.

P&BI: How was Horizon handling contextual before?  

Stone: Horizon believes that there are many variables and taxonomies that go into the development of contextual data targeting capabilities.  Those variations may result in one company's contextual targeting solution to perform stronger than another.  Because of this, it is important to have preferred contextual solutions that are complementary and allow for more optionality and fluidity for all KPI optimizations.  We continue to keep a controlled mix of these preferred contextual partners such as Proximic.

Oracle Ads had been a contextual partner of Horizon’s through their Grapeshot product.  With Oracle Ads being sunset, we felt confident Comscore’s Proximic offered Horizon a strong solution capable of identifying and validating premium, quality content.

P&BI: Was there a pitch or a tryout of some kind? 

Stone: Campaign performance and frequent optimizations between data sets within the fluid programmatic ecosystem.

P&BI: Is Proximic doing anything new, custom or exclusive for Horizon, or is it its standard service?

Stone: Horizon has been keen to test Proximic’s predictive audiences. This privacy-centric targeting capability focus on ID-Free predictive audiences is a unique solution in the industry. As the industry necessitates more privacy-forward solutions, we look forward to expanding the use Proximic’s Predictive Audiences to more of our clients’ programmatic initiatives. In particular, Proximic’s solution has unique partnerships within the premium streaming ecosystem that will enable us to bring increased precision and addressability to this highly desirable media channel while still adhering to current and future privacy regulations.