Horizon Media pilots AI solution to detect cultural shifts mid-campaign

• Horizon Media is testing a brand new artificial intelligence solution from marketing intelligence company Sightly and AI research firm Vurvey Labs that detects cultural shifts mid-campaign and adjusts media decisions accordingly, per details shared with Marketing Dive. 
• The solution, which is being piloted throughout the HorizonOS partner ecosystem, pairs real-time human sentiment from Vurvey Labs with cultural and contextual media data from Sightly. The effort is the results of a partnership between Vurvey Labs and Sightly announced Monday.
• Other agency players, including Dentsu’s Carat, are also experimenting with the AI capability. Horizon Media continues to deal with growing its AI know-how while agencies at large face pressure to move beyond dabbling with the technology to deliver more tangible outcomes.

Horizon Media’s pilot of Sightly and Vurvey Labs’ latest AI-powered solution offers a way to adjust campaigns on the fly in response to changing cultural trends. Agencies face growing pressure to implement AI solutions that provide demonstrable results, with many undergoing acquisitions and substantial restructurings along the way in which.

With Vurvey Labs and Sightly’s audience tool, Horizon Media can perform with greater precision, said John Koenigsberg, executive vice chairman and head of platform partnerships on the agency. The capability is being piloted through the HorizonOS partner ecosystem, an open ecosystem introduced in December that allows clients to create marketing products with a wide range of different vendors. 

“The challenge for agencies isn’t access to more data, it’s knowing which signals are price acting on,” Koenigsberg said in an announcement. “This is precisely why we launched HorizonOS — to foster a community of emerging technology partners who can innovate through intentional, curated collaboration.”

The audience tool integrates Vurvey Labs’ AI-driven People Model with Sightly’s Brand Mentality platform, allowing brands and agencies to create custom audiences informed by cultural signals and always-on human insight across social platforms. 

In a hypothetical use case provided by the businesses, an athletic apparel brand launches a campaign with a “no excuses” messaging — language that historically performs well — before a significant college football program falls under fire for abusive conditioning culture. While a conventional programmatic system wouldn’t process the chance until purchase behavior changes, Vurvey’s People Model captures real human sentiment from the campaign’s audience, including live responses signaling that the emotional posture around “toughness” messaging has shifted. In turn, Sightly’s Brand Mentality platform layers that human signal against contextual signals already out there, including news coverage and brand risk indicators, and surfaces the conflict to the agency. 

Along with Horizon Media, Dentsu’s Carat can also be piloting the mixing. Similarly to Horizon Media, Dentsu has also looked to construct its AI capabilities. In January, the corporate launched Generative Audiences, its own audience intelligence solution that leverages people-based data against AI-driven signals to simulate real audience groups. 

As agencies race to advance their AI expertise, some analysts are skeptical about how far those bets can go, with half of agencies’ proprietary AI platforms expected to either wind down or develop into obsolete by 2029, Gartner predicts. Open-source platforms are expected by Gartner to support greater than 75% of enterprise AI deployments on the client side by 2028, per the researcher.