Horizon Media has launched agentic buying capabilities within its Blu marketing intelligence platform, enabling real-time media purchasing decisions across channels whilst maintaining human oversight. The system integrates audience intelligence, publisher data and campaign performance into a unified decision framework. The technology addresses fragmentation in traditional agency workflows where creative, activation and measurement teams operate separately. Horizon is testing the solution with major publishers including Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and TikTok, using the Databricks platform. Alongside agentic buying, Horizon is expanding its "agentic integration layer" through APIs and agent-based connections, allowing partners to build customised solutions on the Blu platform. Current collaborators include Affinity Solutions, Innovid, Magnite and media companies like iHeartMedia and Snap. The open ecosystem approach contrasts with holding companies' proprietary technology stacks.

Horizon Media launches agentic orchestration layer for real-time media decisioning. HorizonOS' Blu Platform Connects Audience Intelligence, Activation, and Measurement across Publishers Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, Enabled by an Open Ecosystem for Collaboration with the Databricks platform and Newton Research NEW YORK, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Horizon Media Holdings, parent company of the world's largest independent media agency, today announced agentic buying capabilities within HorizonOS' Blu, the agency's marketing intelligence platform. This advanced technology delivers agents that make real-time decisions across channels and publishers, while keeping critical human judgement at the core of the media purchasing strategy. Instead of disconnected workflows, Blu's intelligent agents integrate audience intelligence, publisher data, and campaign performance into a unified decision system that optimizes media buys in real time across multiple channels simultaneously. This is Horizon's latest move to accelerate innovation to the agency's open ecosystem by focusing on how technology can best serve clients and solve a perennial problem for marketers. In typical agency marketing workflows, creative teams, activation teams, and measurement teams operate independently. That traditional framework results in layers of fragmentation that limits the ability to optimize in real time and creates friction when brands need to respond quickly to market conditions. Rather than trying to force clients to become test subjects in the race among traditional holding companies' tech implementations, Horizon's open operating system connects data, partners, and human intelligence into unified decision systems - emphasizing the practical, not the experimental. As part of its ongoing AI initiatives, Horizon is testing, validating and scaling solutions with leading players across the ad ecosystem, leveraging the Databricks platform. These existing partnerships include major media publishers like Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, TikTok and agentic analytics solutions like Newton Research. By participating in Horizon's solutions, these collaborators are pioneering how the agentic buying process can be orchestrated to work on a practical level for all. "Agentic buying will soon be the new standard for high-performance media buying," said Domenic Venuto, Chief Product & Data Officer at Horizon Media Holdings. "And Horizon is enabling it at scale, while maintaining human judgement at the center of decision-making. By removing the intermediary layer, we're also simplifying the path marketers' take to reach the right audiences. This enhanced set of capabilities and partners changes how clients can respond to market conditions, audience behavior, and competitive dynamics in real time rather than in retrospect." The Bigger Picture: An Open Alternative to Vendor Lock-In The agentic buying strategy sits within a larger expansion of Horizon's platform interoperability. Alongside agentic buying, Horizon is expanding its "agentic integration layer" - a set of Blu audience APIs, MCPs (Model Context Protocol), and agent-based integration points. Rather than constraining clients into a single-vendor solution, this layer allows partners - from ad tech companies to media owners to marTech providers - to plug directly into Blu Platform. By building capabilities on top of its platform, partners can co-develop customized solutions within Horizon's open operating system that further extend benefits to its clients. "At a time when the industry is consolidating around fewer choices and closed ecosystems, Horizon is opening the door," said Jeremy Flynn EVP, Head of Product at Horizon Media Holdings. "Our agentic integration layer allows any qualified partner to build on top of Blu. We're creating the infrastructure that allows the best solutions to drive growth for marketers." Blu is broadening a network effect across the media landscape, leveraging Databricks for agentic platform development and Newton Research for real-time measurement. Collaborators taking advantage of Horizon's orchestration layer include Affinity Solutions, Innovid, Kartel, Kochava, Magnite, Predactiv, Sightly, Smartly, Vidmob, Vurvey Labs, ZeroToOne.AI and major media companies, including Clear Channel Outdoor, Disney, Fox, iHeartMedia, NBCUniversal, OUTFRONT Media, Snap, and TikTok. This approach stands in contrast to how holding companies typically operate: consolidating technology ownership and forcing clients into proprietary stacks regardless of fit. Horizon inverts that model. The agency provides the platform and orchestration layer, partners provide specialized capabilities, and clients choose the combination that works for their specific business. Proof Points and Client Impact Discover more Data Formats & Protocols Sweepstakes & Promotional Giveaways HiTechNectar is executing early deployments with key clients, including enabling SharkNinja to securely collaborate with retail partners using Blu audience APIs. "The scalability and efficiency benefit is significant," said Krish Kuruppath EVP, Head of Technology at Horizon Media Holdings. "Previously, if a brand wanted to use five different partners - creative optimization, audience expansion, measurement, activation - we'd have to custom-integrate each one. With the agentic integration layer, those partners can plug into Blu and immediately have access to the data and signals they need from the agency's API and HorizonOS partners. That dramatically accelerates go-to-market and reduces implementation friction." The broader agentic integration layer is available now, with existing and new partners able to integrate via APIs, MCP standards, or agent-based connections. This announcement is part of a broader series of HorizonOS announcements planned for Cannes 2026, where the agency will showcase how the open ecosystem model is enabling capabilities that closed, proprietary systems cannot deliver at the same pace or scale. "The fundamental insight here is simple," said Samantha Rose, EVP Head of Integrated Investment and Programmatic at Horizon Media Holdings. "Technology innovation is happening too fast for any single company - including Horizon - to build everything ourselves. The agencies and platforms that will excel are those willing to open their doors and collaborate. That's what we're doing with agentic buying. It's what we're doing with the integration layer. And it's what we're building toward with HorizonOS and the broader open ecosystem." About Horizon Media Horizon Media, the largest independent media agency globally, delivers data-driven business outcomes for some of the most innovative and ambitious brands. Founded in 1989, headquartered in New York, and with offices in Los Angeles and Toronto, the company employs 2,400+ people and has media investments of more than $8.5 billion. Horizon Media's fundamental belief is that business is personal, which drives its approach to connecting brands with their customers and engaging with its own employees, resulting in industry-leading workplace satisfaction levels (Glassdoor). The company is consistently recognized by independent media outlets for its client excellence and has earned several "Best Workplaces" awards reflecting its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and the life and well-being of everyone at Horizon Media. SOURCE Horizon Media HiTechNectar send you the latest trends and best practice tips for online customer engagement: Receive Updates: HiTechNectar hate spams too, you can unsubscribe at any time.

The great reunification: Horizon Media and Kartel partner to bridge the Creative-Media divide via HorizonOS. Decades ago, the advertising world went through a dramatic divorce. Agencies split their creative departments and media buying desks into entirely separate corporate entities. Creative agencies focused strictly on storytelling, while media agencies focused on data-driven placement and audience targeting. While this split allowed for deep specialization, the modern digital landscape has exposed its fatal flaw: data silos. Today, a beautifully crafted ad copy can easily fail if it doesn't instantly adapt to real-time audience signals, and a perfectly targeted media placement is wasted if the creative asset itself feels irrelevant. Recognizing that this fragmentation damages campaign performance, independent media giant Horizon Media has announced a strategic partnership with Kartel, an advanced creative optimization platform. The goal of this alliance is clear: reunify creative execution and media placement by hardwiring Kartel's creative intelligence engine directly into Horizon's proprietary data and orchestration platform, HorizonOS. The technology: real-time Creative Optimization meet media data. The core friction in digital advertising today isn't a lack of tools; it's a lack of communication between them. Media teams sit on mountain ranges of performance data (such as which demographics are clicking or converting in real time), but creative teams usually have no automated way to adjust visual assets to match those fast-moving audience behaviors. Instead of treat media and creative as two separate conveyor belts, HorizonOS now treats them as a single, living organism. When HorizonOS detects that a specific audience segment is responding strongly to a particular product benefit, message, or aesthetic theme, Kartel's engine can instantly adapt, scale, and deliver creative variations specifically optimized for those exact micro-audiences across streaming, social, and digital displays. The macro impact on marketing and advertising. Horizon Media and Kartel's partnership marks a definitive shift away from legacy, siloed campaign management toward Creative-Media Convergence. The Era of Scalable Hyper-Personalization For many years, the buzzword in the industry was Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO). However, there were always significant technical challenges as well as expensive creative production costs associated with this process. By combining its forces, Martech360 will reduce both these challenges through the automation of DCO within the media buying system. The brand will not be limited to running three different creative ads, instead, they will be able to run thousands of customized ads which will modify their messages according to local weather, shopping behaviors, and demography. Radical Reduction in Production Inefficiencies Traditionally, when a media team realized an ad creative wasn't converting well, they had to flag it, email the creative agency, wait for a designer to mock up a revision, and manually re-upload the asset. This lengthy process can cost brands thousands in wasted ad spend. Reunifying these workflows within a single data hub like HorizonOS means underperforming assets are spotted and adjusted in hours rather than weeks, dramatically improving total campaign agility. How this shapes individual business operations. For enterprise brands and mid-market advertisers working within this ecosystem, the day-to-day management of campaigns changes in several fundamental ways: No Asset Fatigue: Within a rapidly changing digital world, creative assets fatigue very quickly. The audience develops "banner blindness" from exposure to the same video or graphic again and again. By producing new permutations based on data insights, Kartel helps keep campaigns feeling fresh without depleting the clients' design budget. Unified, Transparent Attribution: In cases where creative and media teams operate independently, pointing fingers when the project is not successful becomes quite commonplace. In such an event, the media side will blame the creative aspect of the marketing campaign, while the creative side will fault the media for its inefficiency. With everything being tracked via the HorizonOS system, it will be very clear what exact combination works best. Agility in Marketing for Multiple Market Retail Chains: Chain stores using franchise models can effortlessly adopt nationwide brand storylines that can be easily customized through the automatic insertion of local marketing variations by the HorizonOS-Kartel engine within media assets. The bottom line. The separation of creative and media was built for an era of static billboards and scheduled television programming. In a modern media landscape dictated by programmatic bidding and automated algorithms, that barrier is an expensive liability. Horizon Media's integration of Kartel into HorizonOS proves that the future of advertising efficiency belongs to those who build an open highway between the data that finds the audience and the art that moves them. For brands looking to maximize their digital impact, the lesson is clear: data without creative context is dry, and creative without media data is blind. Bringing them back together isn't just an organizational choice - it's a financial necessity.