Horizon Media Improves Ad Campaign Success with Near Real-Time Insights

As the largest U.S. media agency and the largest independent globally, Horizon Media may be responsible for bringing you your new favorite commercial or getting the latest bingeable series on your radar.

From devising brand campaign strategies to placing ads and measuring their effectiveness, Horizon provides the connective tissue between brand messaging and the media platforms that amplify those messages. With more than 2,300 employees and $9 billion in billings, it's one of the largest independent media agencies in the world. And like every large enterprise, Horizon needs fast, reliable data to drive decisions.

“We’re very focused on consumer insights,” says Michael McCarver, Senior Vice President of Data Solutions and Programmatic for Horizon. “We try to dig beyond traditional demographic and psychographic profiles to really understand consumer behavior and the different subcultures people belong to, which allows brands to bring more advanced targeting to their media.”

To deliver on this goal, Horizon turned to Snowflake for a robust, reliable data platform that helps the team turn consumer data into actionable insights. 

In the world of programmatic advertising, where algorithms make split-second decisions on where to serve a brand’s digital ads, speed is hugely important. Programmatic ad buyers — who sometimes must spend a client’s ad budget all in a single day — can’t wait days or even hours to find out if a campaign is working; they need that information immediately so they can update their strategies in real time and optimize ad budgets.

“We have very short lifecycles in our campaigns, so we need information very fast,” says McCarver. “To understand every impression you buy and all the pieces that come with that requires reliable, scalable data infrastructure. Snowflake has been instrumental in helping us move quickly between data sets that have billions of rows.”

A few years ago, a traditional database of that size might have taken 20 minutes or more to process a single query. With Snowflake, answers come back within seconds. Making that data broadly accessible is also key: With Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing and flexible engineering tools, collaboration is faster and easier. “Faster data retrieval enables us to build bespoke data structures,” McCarver says. “That allows us to get the information we need from the platform directly without having to wait on data engineering teams.”

One of Horizon’s key strategic partners is The Trade Desk (TTD), a leading demand-side platform (DSP) for media buying. Receiving data directly from The Trade Desk platform through Snowflake Marketplace allows Horizon to have up-to-the-second data on how well campaigns are performing.

Prior to sharing this data directly through Snowflake, Horizon had to wait on reports from The Trade Desk dashboard to see if ads had been accepted or were live — a process that often requires hours to refresh with the latest information. Since Horizon’s entertainment clients often need to place hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of programmatic ads in tight spans, sometimes in as little as a 24-hour window, these delays hampered the team’s ability to see campaign success and keep clients updated. 

Now, after close integration with Snowflake, such delays are a mere memory. McCarver can run a query and learn within five seconds whether the ads are live, and if any issues they encountered were due to an error or delay. Eliminating confusion and long wait periods, this seamless data integration has made life much easier for teams across Horizon, saving both time and money versus the previous method of having to pull data from an S3 file. 

“In the past, if a client sent us new creatives on a Friday, and we needed to know if those new creatives were live, I would have had teams staying up until midnight just to understand whether our ads were being blocked,” McCarver says. “Now we can know within 15 minutes whether the new creative was accepted by publishers, and we can go enjoy our weekends.”

Instant clarity into what’s happening in campaigns also benefits Horizon’s clients, who can rest assured their ads are being delivered as planned, as well as DSPs like The Trade Desk, which aren’t forced to diagnose and fix phantom issues.

McCarver says Snowflake has saved his team members so much time that they can now focus on creating new ways to be even more responsive to their clients.

In addition to programmatic ad delivery, Horizon also makes up-front deals with streaming services, allocating a certain percentage of customers’ budgets to guaranteed ad purchases. But when a service has issues with the content of a particular ad, it may pause the campaign without notifying Horizon. 

While the campaign appears to be running smoothly, Horizon’s high-priority, high-revenue direct deal ads may not be — and that’s a problem. To detect when an ad campaign has been paused, Horizon built a proprietary tool that scans event logs across data in Snowflake and sends out alerts if an ad has not run as planned, so the team can step in and find out why. 

“So, not only do we know there’s a pause, we know exactly where to look to find out which partner it is, whom we need to reach out to, and how we can solve this most effectively,” McCarver says. “We have tiny windows in which to spend money, so when we get an alert that a partnership with a TV or movie service may be in jeopardy, that’s a huge tool for us. Without Snowflake, this would have been incredibly complex to accomplish from an engineering standpoint.”

Horizon is now working with some of its entertainment clients to connect out-of-home experiences — such as someone seeing a billboard ad or other public activation — to viewership. This attribution is notoriously tricky to quantify, and Horizon’s success hinges on having access to the right data and the right data platform. 

With the ability to harness data in new and creative ways through Snowflake, Horizon will continue to differentiate itself and unlock new insights for clients. McCarver says, “The capabilities that Snowflake provides play a huge role in empowering these entertainment brands. It really comes down to the power of data, and Snowflake is a central part of that for us.”