Nexxen said on September 9, 2026, that Scale Marketing, an independent full-service agency based in Chicago, has widened its use of the Nexxen demand-side platform, directing a larger portion of client budgets toward working media across channels. The announcement, distributed through GlobeNewswire from New York, frames the arrangement as a way for a boutique operator to run national campaigns with tooling that has historically belonged to holding companies.

In Short

A small independent ad agency in Chicago decided to run more of its clients' advertising through Nexxen's technology instead of splitting the work across separate systems. It matters because the agency says the setup lets it compete with far larger holding companies while keeping more of each client's money in actual ad placements rather than in fees and middle layers. For advertisers weighing where their budgets go, the news is another data point in a year-long industry argument about how much of a media dollar ever reaches a real, viewable impression.

What the two companies described

Nexxen positions itself as an advertising technology platform built on what it calls unique data and media, operating a demand-side platform and a supply-side platform with the Nexxen Data Platform at the center. According to the company, Scale Marketing has used that unified platform and its enterprise DSP capabilities to run what it described as high-stakes campaigns for major brands.

The stated benefit for Scale is structural. For an independent agency handling national accounts, the company argued, the ability to work with the sophistication of a holding company while keeping the responsiveness of a smaller team has turned into a competitive edge. Through the Nexxen DSP, according to the announcement, Scale's team gained a broader view of campaign strategy and execution.

Nexxen supplied one client example without naming the advertiser. According to the company, one of Scale's clients is a large national home service business that set out to drive lower-funnel outcomes such as booked consultation appointments. The company said its full technology stack directed a greater share of that advertiser's media investment toward its audience objectives. No performance figure, spend amount, or campaign duration accompanied the example.

Blake Hochberger, a partner at Scale Marketing, described the appeal in terms of scale and access. "Nexxen gives our team the scale and sophistication of an enterprise DSP, while its unified DSP/SSP architecture enables direct access to premium media so we can operate more efficiently, from audience strategy through activation," he said. Hochberger added that the platform's operator had been, in his words, nimble and accommodating in helping the agency make more of its clients' budgets work across channels.

Michael Lewis, vice president of enterprise sales at Nexxen, framed the company's role as fitting itself to the agency rather than the reverse. "Scale came to us with a clear sense of how they wanted to operate, and our role was to make sure the partnership fit their needs, not the other way around," he said. Lewis characterized the design goal of the unified platform as a model in which the technology recedes into the background so that, as he put it, more of the budget can work in market.

The company did not disclose the commercial terms of the expanded arrangement, the number of accounts involved, the total budget under management, or which media channels the campaigns spanned. The release carries the standard characteristics of a partnership announcement rather than a product launch or an earnings disclosure: a named agency, two executive statements, and a single unattributed case reference.

Why an independent agency is the story

The framing Nexxen chose is not incidental. Independent agencies operating national brands sit at the pressure point of a consolidation cycle in which the largest holding companies have grown larger still. Omnicom completed its acquisition of Interpublic on November 26, 2025, a transaction that concentrated buying power and data assets among a shrinking number of holding structures. For a Chicago shop competing against those entities on national accounts, access to enterprise-grade buying infrastructure without an enterprise-grade organization is the pitch, and it is the same pitch Nexxen has made to independent agencies before.

That pattern is visible in the archive. H/L, an independent multiservice agency, reported up to 14 times higher conversion outcomes for clients across automotive and insurance verticals using Nexxen's demand-side platform, results validated through marketing mix modeling and published in February 2026. H/L subsequently became the first agency to buy native smart TV home screen inventory programmatically through the Nexxen DSP using private marketplace deals, on April 22, 2026. The Scale Marketing announcement extends a run of independent-agency case references that Nexxen has used to argue its stack narrows the gap between boutique and holding-company execution.

The working media argument

The recurring phrase in the announcement is working media, the portion of an advertiser's budget that reaches paid placements rather than being consumed by fees, data costs, and intermediary margins. That phrase carries weight in 2026 because the industry spent much of the year quantifying how little of a programmatic dollar survives the supply chain.

IAB Spain published the first technical guide on supply-side platforms in Spain on April 15, 2026, and the figure it surfaced set the terms of the debate. Citing the Association of National Advertisers Programmatic Transparency Benchmark 2025, the guide found that only 41 percent of total programmatic investment reaches genuine, measurable, viewable impressions free of invalid traffic and made-for-advertising inventory. Transaction costs alone, covering DSP platform fees, data costs, and SSP platform costs, consumed 26.1 percent of every dollar. A further 32.9 percent disappeared into invalid traffic, non-measurable impressions, non-viewable placements, and low-quality environments. The benchmark did show improvement from 2023, when the working media share stood at 36 percent, but the structural inefficiency persisted.

Against that backdrop, a claim to move more budget into working media is a claim to reduce the losses catalogued in that research. Nexxen's technical argument for how it does so rests on operating both sides of the transaction. Because the company runs a demand-side platform and a supply-side platform, it can offer buyers what it describes as direct access to premium media, shortening the chain of intermediaries between an advertiser's budget and a publisher's inventory. The IAB Spain guide put a number on why chain length matters: direct connections deliver 70 to 80 percent of an advertiser's money to publishers, while indirect routes through multiple intermediaries deliver 40 to 50 percent. A unified DSP-SSP path is, in principle, a shorter route.

The announcement does not provide independent measurement of Scale's working media share, before or after the expansion. The working media claim is a description of platform architecture and stated intent, not a verified outcome. Practitioners evaluating the arrangement have the company's framing and two executive statements, without the log-level or third-party validation that would substantiate the efficiency gain.

Where this sits in Nexxen's year

The Scale Marketing announcement arrives at a point when Nexxen has been building outward from its demand-side platform on several fronts. The company reported record first-quarter 2026 financial results on May 13, 2026, with programmatic revenue reaching 81.9 million dollars, a 14 percent increase year over year, and connected TV revenue reaching 29.4 million dollars. Programmatic activity represented 94 percent of total company revenue that quarter. According to Nexxen's Annual Report on Form 20-F, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 4, 2026, programmatic revenue for the full year ended December 31, 2025, was 340.6 million dollars, up from 324.5 million a year earlier, while performance revenue fell to 24.2 million from 41 million.

That performance-revenue contraction is the commercial context for much of Nexxen's product activity this year. The company introduced a full-funnel performance suite inside its DSP on March 24, 2026, bundling AI-driven optimization with incrementality measurement in a single stack and targeting outcome-focused advertisers directly. It followed with a redesigned, AI-native DSP interface on April 6, 2026, expanding an assistant to cover pre-campaign quality assurance, deal diagnostics, and mid-flight optimization. On July 29, 2026, Nexxen cut first-party data onboarding time to 24 hours or less with a self-serve capability inside the platform.

Each of those moves shares a logic with the Scale Marketing arrangement: consolidate functions that historically forced buyers to move between disconnected tools, and present the consolidation as a reduction in operational overhead. Fewer manual steps to launch a campaign, faster resolution of delivery issues, and less time spent pulling reports translate to labor savings at the agency or trading desk. For an independent agency without the headcount of a holding company, that overhead reduction is the practical form the working media argument takes.

Nexxen has also expanded the data flowing through the platform. On July 21, 2026, the company deepened its partnership with Acxiom, the Omnicom-owned data business, bringing household and purchase-level data into Nexxen Discovery, its audience planning tool. A month earlier, in May 2026, ADvolution's influencer fandom segments became available to political buyers through the same tool. The audience layer that Scale draws on for its national campaigns is the same infrastructure Nexxen has been widening across the year.

The competitive frame

Nexxen's pitch to independent agencies runs against a demand-side market concentrated among a handful of platforms. Guideline data covering the first quarter of 2026 placed Google's Display and Video 360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and Yahoo DSP at roughly 85 percent of global programmatic spend, with DV360 alone near 41 percent. For a mid-sized independent ad tech company, winning agency business means offering something the four dominant platforms do not, and Nexxen has settled on the unified DSP-SSP architecture and the working media economics that flow from it as its differentiator.

The largest platforms have moved in a different direction on automation. Yahoo DSP introduced agentic capabilities in January 2026 that execute campaign operations autonomously through natural language, and Amazon consolidated its DSP and Ads Console into a unified Campaign Manager with AI agents in late 2025. Nexxen's approach embeds AI recommendations inside workflows that a human trader still controls, rather than handing execution to autonomous agents. The Scale Marketing statement fits that model: the technology, in Lewis's framing, works in the background while the agency's team retains control over strategy.

Whether the arrangement produces measurable efficiency gains for Scale's clients is not something the announcement establishes. What it does establish is that Nexxen continues to build its independent-agency narrative around a single claim, that operating both sides of the programmatic transaction lets more of a budget reach the market. The industry data on working media explains why that claim resonates in 2026. The absence of a verified figure explains why it remains, for now, a positioning statement rather than a proven result.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Nexxen International Ltd. (Nasdaq: NEXN), an advertising technology company headquartered in Israel with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, and Scale Marketing, an independent full-service agency based in Chicago. Blake Hochberger, a partner at Scale, and Michael Lewis, vice president of enterprise sales at Nexxen, provided statements.

What: Nexxen announced that Scale Marketing has expanded its use of the Nexxen demand-side platform and unified DSP-SSP architecture, directing a larger share of client budgets toward working media. The company supplied one unnamed client example, a national home service business pursuing lower-funnel outcomes, but disclosed no spend figures, performance metrics, or commercial terms.

When: The announcement was dated September 9, 2026, distributed through GlobeNewswire from New York.

Where: The arrangement applies to Nexxen's demand-side platform, used by agencies and media buyers, with Scale Marketing running national campaigns from Chicago.

Why: Nexxen positions its unified platform as a way for independent agencies to run national campaigns with holding-company-grade tooling while keeping more of each budget in paid placements. The framing lands in a year when industry research placed working media at 41 percent of programmatic spend, giving efficiency claims particular resonance, though the announcement provided no independent measurement of the gain.