Horizon Media’s ecommerce agency Night Market has launched Neon, a new platform aimed at helping advertisers better understand where to direct their retail media spending, as well as which retailers are delivering the best results.

The advertiser-facing service is meant to help brands buying retail media maximize their revenue outcomes with AI and predictive analytics. This is meant to fill knowledge gaps among advertisers that still lack the experience with retail media to make informed investment decisions, as well as better understand where spending is performing best.

“Media and commerce data have been analyzed extensively independent of each other, and…we saw an opportunity to combine these datasets in order to optimize media spending with the goal of driving revenue outcomes,” said Randy Browning, president of Night Market. He adds that, while individual retailers have an understanding of how media performs within their own networks, Neon aims to provide advertisers with a similar level of knowledge across different retailers.

Neon brings together mixed media modelling, sales data and campaign performance data from retailers to make its ROI predictions. It works across different online and bricks-and-mortar retailers, optimizing spend across each one, or by specific tactics. It also has capabilities to direct prospective customers to the best-performing product pages.

Horizon claims the system was designed to deliver a 20% lift in revenue outcomes related to retail media, and has already been working with Hershey on early stages of the platform.

GroupM’s latest forecast estimated that retailers globally earned $88 billion USD in revenue from selling ads last year, a number it expects to reach $101 USD billion – roughly 18% of digital advertising and 11% of all advertising. It further predicted that retail media advertising will grow by about 60% by 2027, exceeding that of all digital advertising. In the U.S., where retail media is most developed, Forrester predicts retail media spending to double over the next four years.

This has led to a lot of activity from all potential players in the retail media realm. In addition to the retailers themselves, tech companies like Salesforce and Microsoft have recently been developing their own tools and platforms for managing retail media data and networks.