Horizon Media, the largest U.S. media agency and the largest independent globally, announced a significant milestone in its data-driven marketing excellence and technological innovation developments — a first-of-its-kind multi-year strategic partnership with Akkio, a pioneering AI marketing data analytics startup. This strategic alliance comes at a pivotal moment in the marketing and advertising industry when generative AI and advanced machine learning are rapidly reshaping traditional approaches. As businesses increasingly seek tangible workflow efficiencies and data-driven solutions, Horizon Media’s partnership with Akkio places the agency and Horizon’s blu. platform at the forefront of a transformative wave. By combining Horizon’s deep industry expertise and entrepreneurial dexterity with Akkio’s application-specific AI technology for marketing agencies, this collaboration represents a significant leap forward in the application of AI to solve complex marketing and growth challenges for client brands and drive measurable business outcomes with agility and speed.
With significant monetary investments in technology, licensing, and talent over the last several years, Horizon has strategically balanced the deliberate development of powerful in-house solutions with striking advantageous external partnerships. This partnership is an extension and expansion of those efforts and will center on the continued co-development of blu. into an even more intuitive, AI-powered platform that leverages and builds on Horizon’s existing robust data ecosystem, including its many enrichment partners and proprietary technical capabilities. The interface will enable both agency and client-side users to employ natural-language interactions to synthesize insights across complex data sets — dramatically enhancing the effectiveness of planning, activating, and measuring marketing and media campaigns. The rollout is scheduled for fall 2024.
Horizon Media’s partnership with Akkio marks a pioneering moment for the media and advertising industry, as no other agency has fully integrated an LLM-native infrastructure at this scale. Through this collaboration, Horizon is redefining media planning and campaign management by embedding Akkio’s intelligent solutions directly into the core of the blu. platform and its operations. This first-of-its-kind deployment not only streamlines the entire campaign process—from data ingestion and audience modeling to media execution and performance analytics—but also amplifies the precision and impact of every media dollar spent. With Akkio’s Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities, Horizon will further expand its competitive edge by developing a custom proprietary LLM, uniquely designed to support Horizon’s growth in the AI-driven future of media.
“What we have formed is bigger than a partnership; we are transforming our business and engagement model to bring our clients transformative platform access,” said Bill Koenigsberg, Founder and CEO. “Our end-to-end blu. intelligence and marketing platform driven by AI brings unparalleled power to enhance how both agency and client-side users interact with data, harness business and audience intelligence, surface insights, and analyze results. In short, we are delivering something that the industry has not seen coming and that will enable marketers to navigate the increasingly complex marketing and digital landscape with greater agility and insight.”
In addition, this partnership will adhere to strict ethical guidelines, ensuring transparency, fairness, and privacy in all AI-driven processes. Robust measures have also been implemented to mitigate bias, protect client data privacy, and maintain the highest standards of data governance throughout the development and deployment of the platform.
“AI is fundamentally reshaping industries, and we are thrilled to partner with Horizon to drive this transformation in the agency world,” said Jon Reilly, Akkio co-founder and CEO. “With the robust blu. data ecosystem, plus Horizon’s high integrity and shared entrepreneurial DNA, we are positioned to accelerate innovation in ways that were previously unimaginable. Insights that once took days to develop can now be uncovered in seconds. Data analysis, once limited to a select few, will now be accessible to many—empowering teams across the board. This partnership leverages Horizon’s independence and agility to quickly apply our deep expertise in generative AI and AI-driven data analysis to the everyday challenges media agencies face on behalf of their client brands.”
Key differentiators of Horizon’s groundbreaking Akkio-powered platform include:
- Intuitive User Interface: Featuring chat capabilities and access to source code and data logic, with emphasis on data visualization for streamlined insights application.
- Democratized Access: Empowering all users to easily run complex queries and receive outputs.
- LLM-Native Architecture: Built from the ground up using Large Language Models, ensuring high observability and agility without legacy system constraints.
- Adaptive AI Selection: Akkio’s flexible architecture selects the optimal LLM for each task, ensuring high-quality output and empowering the partnership to capitalize on emerging use cases.
- Ecosystem Integration: Serving as connective tissue across Horizon’s data and tool ecosystem (as well as client data and technology stacks) and supported by continued infrastructure enhancements.
- Industry-Leading Security: Adhering to Horizon’s industry-leading security credentials and Akkio governance practices, and deeply attentive to upholding responsible stewardship of client businesses.
The rollout will include an Alpha phase involving select clients from the CPG, Entertainment, and Retail sectors and an ongoing collaborative and iterative approach to shape the future roadmap, continuously opening new avenues for innovation.
On Monday, Oct. 7 at Advertising Week New York, Akkio co-founder and CEO John Reilly and Horizon Media Head of AI Tim Rich will discuss concrete strategies for enterprise AI adoption in marketing and “how to implement AI across diverse marketing organizations and workflows, driving smarter, more efficient campaigns that deliver outsized results and marry AI-powered insight with the best of marketer intuition.”
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