• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 7, 2025

Night Market, Horizon Media’s commerce agency affiliate, and Keen Decision Systems created a partnership that redefines how brands plan, optimize, and measure marketing incrementality across all channels. The companies will announce the partnership on Tuesday. 

It will combine Night Market’s NEON, an AI-powered retail media and storefront optimization platform, with Keen’s adaptive marketing-mix modeling (MMM) software.

“One of the biggest barriers we have identified is that advertisers have made real-time planning and optimization decisions not in line with MMM evaluations that follow campaigns,” said Randy Browning, president of Night Market. “It unnerves advertisers when they’re having to spend so much money to keep up with competitors without having the confidence in that spend.”

That ad spend is expected to skyrocket. U.S. retail media investment will rise more than $100 billion by 2027, according to Emarketer.

The combined technologies offer advertisers predictive planning and optimization recommendations to gain the true incremental impact of investments across retail media, trade marketing, shopper marketing, national advertising, and more.

For example, a client that worked with NEON was told by a major retailer that the campaign delivered a $3.50 return on ad spend, but after running a post-campaign MMM analysis on the campaign, it was a loss of $3.50.

“Ask every major client in the retail world, and they will tell you this is the number one barrier,” he said. “These predictions go from the channel to the tactic to the keyword level.” 

There is a disconnect in real-time in how clients in retail media plan and optimize and evaluate the MMM performance post-campaign. This should give them confidence by aligning the two.

The solution leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze data from more than 160 sources. It provides actionable insights that support macro-level strategy and on-the-ground execution.

The partnership, which the companies will unveil at CES 2025, also provides holistic measurement of incrementality across all marketing channels; seamless activation via retail media networks and campaign management platforms; and multiple incrementality metrics, including sales, revenue, new-to-brand metrics, customer lifetime value, and brand lift.