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Horizon Media Expands HorizonOS Labs with Third Cohort, Bringing New Partners into its Open Ecosystem to Tackle Marketers’ Growth Challenges

Cohort 3 Reflects Market Acceleration and Client Priorities as Marketing Technology Shifts From Insight to Action NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2026 — Horizon Media today unveiled 11 companies named to the third cohort of HorizonOS Labs, the agency’s structured innovation accelerator. With more than 50 partners having gone through the program, Horizon serves as a curator of emerging technology, simplifying the often time-consuming process of identifying, testing and scaling solutions so clients can build bespoke operating platforms around their unique business challenges. The program is designed to distinguish viable innovation from vendor promises through a transparent, client-centric process focused on real-world application. “The market is moving faster than annual technology reviews can accommodate,” said John Koenigsberg, EVP and Head of Platform Partnerships at Horizon Media Holdings. “One clear shift emerged from Cohort 3: the vast majority of partners are focused on growth, closing the loop between surfacing, modeling and finding – and actually driving action. What makes these capabilities valuable isn’t any one of them alone, but what happens when they connect with each other and with what a brand already knows.” Cohort 3 is organized around three Growth Frontiers. They include: Unlocking Growth from the Customers You Already Know. Brands can now understand the people already connected to them far more deeply than before, and act on that understanding in the same motion, across the channels they own and the media they buy. Creative Supply at the Speed of Everything Else. Precision in targeting and measurement has raised what creative can be asked to do, and production has caught up—generating, versioning and governing at the volume a channel actually requires. Winning Customers When Machines Shape Discovery. More of the journey now runs through machines: search that answers rather than lists, assistants that shop, screens that decide what comes next. Presence in those spaces is earned differently, and it can now be measured, shaped and acted on. Each frontier unifies what was once fragmented: paid, owned and consumer insight; media and creative; and human strategy and intelligent workflows. The 11 Cohort 3 partners, chosen from more than 600 RFI submissions, reflect Horizon’s commitment to an open ecosystem where clients can access best fit technologies without vendor lock-in or proprietary constraints. The 11 were selected on what they can do: how readily they connect to the systems a client already operates, their willingness to work alongside other companies in the cohort, and concrete evidence that the work drives business outcomes. “AI is changing the rules for how brands grow,” said Bob Lord, President of Horizon Media Holdings. “The brands that will drive growth aren’t looking for a better way to buy media. They’re solving for customer value by building an operating platform that brings their data, customers, technology and people together around the problems that matter most to their business. There’s no off-the-shelf answer to that. Horizon is committed to bringing the open ecosystem together to build the right capabilities for each customer.” The Cohort 3 Partners — Grouped by Growth Frontier — Include: Unlocking Growth from the Customers You Already Know SQREEM: SQREEM is a behavioral intelligence platform that builds real‑time, predictive audience and intent models from massive volumes of unstructured digital data (web, app, social, video) rather than relying on predefined segments or static taxonomies. Aaru: Aaru is a statistical simulation engine for predicting human behavior. Our platform enables organizations to test products, messaging, and strategies with simulated respondents to understand how people will react before making real-world decisions Zenapse: Zenapse is an emotionally intelligent, agentic marketing platform, purpose-built to quickly drive business outcomes through goal-based conversion optimization, personalization and data — all within existing media and workflows. Hightouch: Hightouch is an agentic marketing platform where AI agents and marketing teams work together to brief, create, review, and launch campaigns across 300+ channels, guided by a shared “marketing brain” that learns from your brand, customer data, and every campaign’s results. Creative Supply at the Speed of Everything Else AdGreetz: AdGreetz offers DCO+®, which personalizes any ad into unlimited, relevant, data-driven versions served to each viewer and AdChef®, which orchestrates 50+ AI models with Proprietary Creative Agents to generate original, broadcast-quality video, display, UGC/influencer, rich media, carousel and product ads from a brief, URL or prompt in minutes. Storyteq: ITG is an AI-enabled content company that helps global brands deliver personalized content at scale. Powered by our Storyteq platform, ITG combines technology, data and production expertise to lower costs and lift ROAS by up to 300%. Anoki: Anoki AI is the contextual video intelligence company advancing CTV with ContextIQ and its award-winning AI Marketing Co-Pilot, helping every ad find its perfect home, scene by scene. Winning Customers When Machines Shape Discovery Bluefish: Bluefish is the Agentic Marketing Platform (AMP) for the Fortune 500. EmberOS: emberos, the Operating System for AI brand management, shows brands what AI is about to say about them, helps them change it at the source, and proves the change worked. Olyzon: Olyzon is an agentic orchestration layer for advertising: its agents connect to any buying interface through open protocols to plan, activate and optimize across platforms, starting with CTV and extending to YouTube, Social, DOOH and Audio, live today across managed accounts. Fuse: FUSE+Emet is the truth infrastructure layer for AI data systems. AI doesn’t know when it’s wrong. Emet does. The Cohort 3 partners will be showcased at an in-person event in New York on October 1, where they will present to Horizon clients and engage in discussions around potential pilot deployments. Following the showcase, partners will be matched with interested client brands to scope and advance specific pilots, with client participation helping determine which opportunities move forward. Looking ahead, HorizonOS Labs will open its next RFI process in early 2027.

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The Future of Programmatic Is Being Decided Right Now

The Future of Programmatic Is Being Decided Right Now And the industry continues to focus on the wrong fights. By Navneet Singh VP, Managing Director of Programmatic | Product Contributor: Chris Gum, VP Data Solutions The programmatic industry thrives on a new obsession every few months, and the latest battleground is the DSP arms race. Who’s winning and who’s not, has been thrown into the spotlight by Publicis Groupe’s recent decision to no longer recommend The Trade Desk to its clients. Before that it was Amazon vs. The Trade Desk. While this is today’s news, the trade press is full of others: Are SSPs undercutting DSPs? Is OpenPath a genuine innovation or another revenue lever? Can IAB Tech Lab’s initiatives co-exist with AgenticAdvertising.org and those popularizing AdCP? While the industry remains fixated over these questions, they are fundamentally the wrong ones. We are arguing over the plumbing while ignoring the architecture. This isn’t about which platform wins the DSP arms race. The real question is who is in control. The focus on DSPs is a dangerous distraction, because the entity with the most to lose—the one whose budget is on the line—is not the platform, but the buyer. The real question is: Who Controls the Intelligence Layer? The question is not “who has the best platform or the lowest cost or take rate” but who owns the decisioning engine layer on top. The focus should be on the layer that determines which signals matter, which models to deploy, which platforms to activate against, and how to create a feedback loop that compounds learning over time. That is the fight that matters. The DSP is not the Strategy. The Intelligence that Commands it Is. DSPs deserve more credit than the current discourse gives them. The engineering required to process millions of bid requests per second, evaluate inventory across thousands of advertisers simultaneously, and clear auctions at sub-hundred-millisecond latency is a huge asset for the buyer. Think of a DSP’s processing power as a massive radar – the scope of what it can see and evaluate in real time is unlike anything else in the advertising ecosystem. But that radar has a structural constraint. A DSP is not just representing you; it is representing thousands of advertisers at once, allocating QPS across all of them, pacing budgets, managing competing auction dynamics. When the system identifies a high-value impression, it has to decide which of its many clients gets the shot – and that decision is governed by the platform’s economics, not yours. For years, this was the best arrangement available. The platform you picked determined your data strategy, supply path, optimization methodology, and measurement framework. The entire agency operating model in digital orbited around it. That era is ending – not because DSPs have stopped being useful, but because the strategic decisions are migrating above them. Which audiences to pursue, what outcomes to optimize toward, how to score users, how to learn from one cycle and feed that back into the next – those decisions increasingly belong to a layer the DSP does not own. Meanwhile, the lines between demand side and supply side are collapsing. SSPs are bringing ad servers, bidders, and containerized execution environments to the table – FreeWheel’s Buyer Cloud, Magnite’s SpringServe and ClearLine product suite, PubMatic’s Activate, and the containerization model Index Exchange pioneered. Buyers now have more surfaces to deploy decisioning than ever before. That’s a good thing – but only if you have an open orchestration system that connects all of those surfaces rather than treating each one as another disconnected silo. The proliferation of execution endpoints only reinforces the central point: the bidder is not where value compounds anymore. The intelligence layer above it is. Everyone Has a Platform. Not Many Are Building the Layer That Matters. In practice, the intelligence layer means building what we think of as an open operating system: a cross-platform signal engine that includes a platform, data architecture, identity spine, feedback mechanisms, human intelligence, and trained talent activating it. It trains predictive models on real business outcomes – actual conversions, revenue events, lifetime value – and distributes those scores into whatever execution surface makes the most sense. Amazon’s commerce engine for retail brands. Google’s intent infrastructure for search-driven performance. Microsoft’s open web supply. Magnite or FreeWheel’s curated CTV inventory. A direct SSP integration through containerized workloads. The platform is secondary. The intelligence is primary. This is the work being done with HorizonOS and its Blu platform. It is not a DSP replacement – it is a decisioning engine, designed to plug into big tech rather than compete with it. The result: a client’s data is portable, their models are interoperable, and their learnings compound from one platform to the next – because the system is built to be open for the benefit of the marketer, not the agency. With AI, there is a real opportunity to build smarter, more tailored radars on top of this. Intelligence systems can shape and filter what gets evaluated before it ever reaches the auction – scoring inventory at the supply level, sending more qualified bid requests, making decisions that sharpen demand-side execution by default. The intelligence layer determines the quality of what the bidder even gets to see. Top-Down AI vs. Bottom-Up Operating System The predominant AI narrative in the market is top-down automation – summarize the brief, generate the plan and compress the workflow. The pitch is: we are going to use AI to make everything we already do faster and cheaper. In theory, yes. But it focuses almost entirely on the planning layer while never touching the infrastructure underneath. Faster audience queries, cohesive forecasting, and rapid media planning are efficiencies, not solutions to core strategic problems The agencies approaching this correctly are building from the bottom at a foundational level. They are mapping connection points, ensuring data portability, and building legitimate feedback loops: we ran with this algorithm partner on this platform, here is what we learned, here is how that

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