Night Market and Keen Join Forces to Transform Marketing for Brand Advertisers

At CES 2025, Night Market, the commerce agency affiliate of Horizon Media, and Keen Decision Systems introduced a strategic partnership designed to tackle pressing challenges in modern marketing. This collaboration brings together Night Market’s NEON platform—an AI-powered retail media and storefront optimization solution—and Keen’s adaptive marketing mix modeling software to deliver a unified, next-generation approach to planning, optimizing, and measuring marketing incrementality.

Night Market is Horizon Media’s commerce agency affiliate, specializing in end-to-end commerce solutions powered by NEON, a proprietary AI-powered SaaS platform with a 97.5% accuracy rate. While Keen Decision Systems is a SaaS company that helps brands forecast, optimize, and analyze their marketing investments, managing over $7.5 billion in marketing spend for clients like Poppi and Athletic Brewing.

In today’s fast-evolving retail and commerce landscape, success demands tools that provide predictive insights, holistic measurement, and actionable optimization. Together, NEON and Keen can help bridge the gap, enabling brands to understand the true incremental impact of their investments across retail media, trade marketing, shopper marketing, and national advertising. 

What Makes This Marketing Partnership Revolutionary?

“Our combined AI capabilities empower advertisers with predictive planning and optimization, ensuring every dollar drives measurable impact across retail media,” Greg Dolan, CEO of Keen Decision Systems told Street Fight.

“By measuring interaction effects between marketing channels, incremental revenue, and the halo of retail media spend on offline revenue, we eliminate waste, enhance decision-making, and help brands navigate a multi-channel, multi-retailer world to achieve greater profitability and precision.”

This partnership not only streamlines planning and execution but also ensures that brands maximize incremental revenue by leveraging real-time campaign data and post-campaign insights. It allows advertisers to make decisions with precision and confidence that their investments are driving tangible results.

Randy Browning, President of Night Market, emphasized the transformative potential of the collaboration: “This partnership combines NEON’s AI-driven predictive planning and optimization capabilities with Keen’s advanced marketing modeling to give brands the pre- and in-campaign clarity needed to make data-driven decisions with confidence. It’s one of the rare cases in which 1 plus 1 equals 3.” 

Core Capabilities

This integrated solution offers a suite of advanced features that redefine how brands approach their marketing investments:

• Holistic Incrementality Measurement: Evaluate direct and halo effects of retail media spend across all marketing channels.
• AI-Driven Real-Time Optimization: Receive daily and weekly recommendations for optimizing campaigns across channels, audiences, and even down to the keyword level.
• Comprehensive Metrics: Track multiple metrics like sales, revenue, new-to-brand customers, customer lifetime value, and brand lift.
• Seamless Activation: Directly activate campaigns via retail media networks and campaign management platforms.

Addressing Key Industry Challenges

In the United States, digital retail media ad spending is expected to grow to approximately $166 billion by 2025. Additionally, online sales are forecast to rise by 8.6% in 2025, reaching approximately $1.3 trillion. This rise of retail and commerce media has added complexity to marketing strategies, making it harder for brands to measure true ROI and ensure that their investments generate incremental revenue.

NEON, launched in 2023, was developed to help brands transition from experimenting with retail media to fully integrating it into their marketing strategies. Its AI-driven capabilities simplify forecasting, planning, and optimization, while Keen’s marketing mix modeling addresses challenges like integrating diverse measurement methods and adapting to the changing role of retail media.

“This next-generation integrated approach between in-campaign optimization and post-campaign measurement will give brands—and stakeholders across marketing, commercial, and finance—the confidence to predictively invest in tactics that will deliver maximum incremental value,” said Browning. “Never again will brands have to optimize on a discrepancy—a +$3.50 ROAS that later measures as delivering -$3.50 ROI.”

A Paradigm Shift in Marketing Strategy

The combined technologies of NEON and Keen Decision Systems analyze data from over 160 sources, enabling macro-level strategic planning and on-the-ground tactical execution. This collaboration addresses the need for tools that allow brands to:

• Plan Holistically: Account for granularity and frequency in omnichannel retail decisions.
• Measure with Precision: Understand the true incremental impact of every investment.
• Optimize Rapidly: Leverage AI-powered recommendations to adapt strategies in real time.

 “The solution we’ve developed provides not just clarity but actionable intelligence,” said Dolan. “By uniting our capabilities, we’re enabling brands to better align their marketing, finance, and commercial teams around a shared understanding of what’s driving results.”

What This Means for the Future of Advertising

The Night Market-Keen partnership focuses on the future of marketing: one where AI and machine learning power smarter decisions, more personalized campaigns, and measurable ROI. It has the potential to help brands navigate today’s multi-channel, multi-retailer environment while staying agile and customer-focused.