It’s not exactly ChatGPT, but Horizon Media has debuted an AI tool that could help advertisers peer over walled gardens.

Earlier this month, the agency announced that it had created a tool called Neon, housed within Horizon’s e-commerce division Night Market, that aims to help advertisers tie together and better allocate their spend across the booming retail media network ecosystem.

Big picture: In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, retail media networks are all the rage: Companies from Walmart to Dollar General to 7-Eleven to Marriott all have one. But they’re still pretty much walled gardens, which can make it difficult for advertisers to compare and predict where their next dollar should go, a game of apples to oranges—or, in this case, more like Walmarts to Targets.

• Horizon is looking to address that with the help of an AI platform that it says can predict quarterly ROI based on an analysis of past sales figures, campaign performance data reported by retailers, and historical marketing mix modeling ROI data.
• It’s the “normalization of the data across different retailers,” Randy Browning, president of Horizon’s Night Market, told Marketing Brew. “We wanted to create a universal view.”
• The tool took two and a half years to build and test and can be used with 30 different retail media networks, including Albertsons, Kroger, Amazon, and Walmart, Browning said.

For example, if a company is selling candy across different e-commerce platforms, Neon could make a prediction (out to three months or more in the future) on which retailers and which channels within those retailers (search and display, for instance) it thinks would drive the most revenue, Browning said.

Continue reading here.—RB

ICYMI, earlier this month, we compiled all sorts of fun facts, trivia, and notable moments from Super Bowls past. Give it a read, and next time you’re in a meeting, ditch the small talk and instead explain why Oscar Mayer pulled its sponsorship of the halftime show in the ’90s.

With the game just a few weeks away, the teasers are in full swing, the celebrity name-drops are rolling in, and we’re busy figuring out which snacks we plan to eat that night (send us your recs).

We put together some questions for Marketing Brew readers ahead of the game. Click here to share your all-time favorite Super Bowl ad, which celeb you’d love to see in a commercial this year, and more. We’ll share some of the answers in an upcoming newsletter.

Our colleagues over at Retail Brew spent some time at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference last week. Retail Brew reporter Maeve Allsup put together some of the conference’s overarching themes. Read a snippet below or click here to read her full recap.

Loyalty programs and the opportunity to personalize the shopping experience is a key focus for many major retailers this year. That’s in part due to the choppy economic waters they’re steering through as we move into 2023.

The tightening of consumer purse strings and flat inflation-adjusted shopper incomes points to the need for brands to “dial up” loyalty, said Rachel Dalton, head of retailer insights at data analytics company Kantar, who interviewed Target’s EVP and chief growth officer,  Christina Hennington, on Tuesday.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Column: Here are five strategies that can help the industry prepare for the end of the third-party cookie. You know, if it ever actually happens.

Bang for your buck: Check out 24 ways to allocate your marketing spend.

What’s next: A look at some creative trends that are expected to pick up steam this year.

Ins ’n outs: Inbound marketing can engage, delight, and retain customers with the right content that’ll help brands grow. Learn more about the difference between outbound and inbound marketing in BrandExtract’s illuminating article.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Cellophane…for newborns?

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• What’s going on in the world of measurement in 2023
• Here are the brands starting 2023 with new CMOs
• How will brands use TikTok in Super Bowl marketing this year?