In-Store Media Works When Three Things Are True: Horizon Commerce's Jason Colon

Jason, I know that Horizon Commerce is about connecting these ideas of commerce, experience, and brand together.

So can you first just lay the groundwork for us? How does Horizon Commerce see itself in this space? What are the values that you're providing to the industry, and what are the values that you're using to guide the work that you do?

So if you think about it, a consumer today can really discover a product anywhere.

It could be through social, it could be through a video ad, it could be in a store in an aisle.

But what's different today than I would say what has been historically the shopping experience for consumers is that any of those experiences now can be a shoppable experience.

The store isn't always a destination, and that means that we need to ensure that these experiences that we're putting in front of consumers are shoppable when they need to be, or that we can quickly bring a consumer into a shoppable environment.

So when we think about that context of the consumer experience and how rapidly it's changing, and then we could talk about AI and those sorts of things later on, we believe that it's critical to connect media and experience.

All these new ways where you can identify and find products and shop are only as powerful as the experience that's connected to them.

So if I'm driving a media unit to a particular landing page, or if I'm putting a particular ad in front of somebody as they're shopping, if we're not connecting the brand assets, if we're not connecting the communications plan across all of those touch points, we're really not able to shape the consumer's perspective of a brand or shape their shopping behavior.

So we believe it's critical to think about how content and media or experience and media work together to drive outcomes.

Brand and commerce are not two different things.

There's been this debate or this narrative in our industry for some time around brand and performance or brand and commerce.

You need to have an interconnected approach to understanding who your consumer, who your audience is, and then how you're reaching them through all of these different formats and touch points, regardless of what the objective of that particular component of the campaign might mean.

So being in Horizon Media, one of the largest independent agencies in the space, we are very, I think, uniquely positioned to be able to bring these things together and reduce complexity or confusion for the consumer on behalf of the brands that we're working with.

But it's really complex and really confusing, right? I mean, you think about the olden days of like you put up a billboard and maybe some people come into your restaurant or something, right? Like you do almost like a linear thing and you do a marketing task that's relatively simple and you get some results.

And the story it seems like of the entire marketing profession is just one of increasing complexity, increasing interconnectedness, increasing overlap.

I think how many marketers over the last couple decades have said something like, "The old time marketing funnel is dead." Who even knows what we're talking about now, right? It's everything is so interconnected.

So how do you see this? Do you see this as like a bunch of spaghetti strands and infinitely interconnected touch points that you have to kind of unwind and untangle for clients and make sense of?

Yeah.

The reality is it, it is really complex.

There, there's a significant amount of fragmentation across the media ecosystem.

The media that consumers are engaging with is fragmented across devices and channels and surfaces.

The data ecosystem that we leverage on the marketing side has become increasingly complex as retailers have really unlocked the power of that data and monetized it through the capabilities they have, and rightfully so.

They've been very, I would say, prudent about how they unlock that data in a safe way that protects consumer privacy but also allows them to, to drive value for their business and for their brands that they work with.

So with all of that complexity, brands really do need a growth partner to help them understand how to bring these things together to create that simple, connected, networked experience for the consumer and the shopper.