• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

Separate announcements by two of the biggest media agency organizations released within 24 hours of each other tell a story about not just the directions they are heading in, but where the entire industry is.

One came from WPP Media Wednesday morning, the other comes from Horizon Media this morning, and both of them are about advances they are making integrating their proprietary data stacks with those of blue chip audience data suppliers.

In the case of WPP Media, it was what it touts as a first-mover deal with YouTube, which while it is an advertising inventory supplier, it also is an audience metrics provider. That in itself is worthy of a column of its own, but for today lets stick with the significance of its data integration deal with WPP, which follows.

In the case of Horizon Media, this morning’s announcement is about a deal with Nielsen, expanding its ability to match its proprietary consumer identity signals – the “Blu IDs” – that are the core of its Big Data platform going by the same name, as well as its entire operating system tech stack, known internally as “Horizon OS.”

I’m going to provide some details about how both those organizations describe the news merits of these deals, but the truth is, they are pretty opaque in terms of how they actually operate, because they are proprietary data integration deals, after all.

The important part about both of them, is that they are being integrated at a very high level, utilizing APIs – or application protocol interfaces – which basically means, it’s the computers of one partner talking directly to the computers of the other partner and rendering the data in a way that has more meaningful applications for the end-using partner.

In terms of WPP Media’s deal with YouTube, Wednesday’s announcement is even a little more complicated, because it involves API-level interactions with two parts of its organization for two parts of YouTube’s: WPP’s “Open” platform, and WPP influencer shop The Goat Agency’s AI tools, which are now directly integrated with YouTube’s “content” and “creator” insights database.

I wish I could explain explicitly why this is a first-mover for WPP Media, but even with my follow-up questions asking what the deal enables its organization to do that it couldn’t do before, I still don’t understand the material significance in a way I know how to describe. So let me explain it in WPP’s own words, responding to that question:

[It enables us to] “holistically weave YouTube Content and Creator intelligence into our planning, activation and measurement approach so that we no longer plan influencer activity in isolation. WPP Media can accurately match creators and their audiences to unlock integrated marketing outcomes that drive measurable impact for clients.”

And while that sounds like an important thing, I don’t actually know what it means, except that they say it’s better.

By the way, I don’t mean any of this as a slight, and honestly take my inability to explain the news value to you better as a failing on my part. But I fear it is more of the way of our world going forward, where machine-to-machine data integrations are opaque innovations that are invisible and incomprehensible to people sitting on the outside looking in.

And honestly, it’s kind of frustrating to a trade reporter who is supposed to make sense of these deals, put them into perspective, and separate one organization’s claims from another. But I’ve reached the point where much of the time all I can do is tell you what they said they did, and why they say it’s important, even if it’s mostly just rhetoric about technical integrations and proprietary data.

It’s funny though, sitting here and trying to make sense of theses two stories as news of the week for MediaPost’s readers, something else occurred to me about what the world’s biggest and most powerful media services organizations consider their own most important news to be.

When I started covering agencies, and for most of my career, the most important news they put out was things like media-buying deals with the biggest media company suppliers – big TV networks, consumer magazines, etc. – or big account wins. Occasionally, they’d geek out about some internal, proprietary research or unique new methodology they were using to understand the underlying value of using media to help brands reach consumers.

That last part was always the most interesting for me, because it was about the human-powered intelligence coming from big research thinkers inside agencies to find new ways of getting a competitive advantage by looking at something – media inventory and the audiences they reach – in a new and unique way. And sure, they used data, metrics, some primary research of their own, or from syndicated research suppliers like Nielsen and its ilk, but it was about smart people developing smarter ways to look at it.

And the best part was they could usually explain to me why their method or approach was better and led to insights that helped them differentiate their supply chain in new-and-improved ways that led to better media and audience outcomes.

And as frustrated as I am that I can no longer do that in a machine-to-machine data integration marketplace, it also saddens me that I’m missing out on the most essential parts of those stories, because they usually were very interesting – at least to me.

Anyway, enough about me. Let me wrap this up by explaining two more things: the news announced by Horizon and Nielsen this morning, and something more broadly about both Horizon and WPP.

First, according to Nielsen the deal represents “an evolution” of ground work Horizon already has paved, including its 2019 deal integrating its Blue IDs with both Nielsen’s third-party audience segments, as well as its clients’ own first-party data about consumers.

Specifically, the new deal enables Horizon to match its Blu IDs with Nielsen’s IDs via TransUnion’s data, which arguably is one of the biggest, most indelible identify graphs in the industry overall.

Both Horizon’s Nielsen and WPP Media’s YouTube Insights deals are milestones in a progression toward more perfect consumer identity fidelity.

And lastly, it was largely based on the spade work both organizations did during 2025’s “year of transformation” in reengineering their Big Data/tech stack/operating systems that the editors of MediaPost picked both organizations as two of our agencies of the year. You’ll be able to read more about why when we publish our awards profiles early next month getting into those weeds, but for now, let’s just say they both moved the ball, albeit in slightly different directions.