Smartly and Horizon Media Holdings today announced an expanded partnership making Smartly the first SaaS platform activation partner to bring Blu audience segments directly into advertising campaign workflows via the Blu Audience API, covering social, commerce, and connected TV channels.

The announcement, dated June 22, 2026, and made from New York, positions Smartly as the entry point through which advertisers can move Horizon's proprietary audience intelligence out of the planning stage and into live campaign execution. The integration spans social, connected TV (CTV), and Google, giving brands a single workflow where audience segments, creative optimization, and media performance are handled together rather than in sequence.

What Blu is and why the API matters

Horizon Media Holdings is the privately held parent company of Horizon Media, which the company describes as the largest U.S. media agency and the largest independent media agency globally. Its portfolio includes Horizon Next, Horizon Commerce, Horizon Business, One Horizon, HS&E, and Blue Hour Studios. Horizon Holdings also operates a 50/50 partnership with Havas Media Network in the performance-driven agency network Horizon Global.

Within that structure, Blu is Horizon's proprietary audience intelligence platform, part of what the company calls HorizonOS. According to Bob Lord, President of Horizon Media, the platform reflects years of investment in understanding consumer decision-making. "The Blu Platform represents years of investment in understanding how people actually make decisions," Lord said. "Partnering with Smartly means that intelligence no longer stops at the insight stage, it travels all the way through to the creative and the buy. For our clients, that's the difference between knowing your audience and actually winning them."

The Blu Audience API is the technical mechanism through which this integration functions. It allows Blu audience segments - built from Horizon's proprietary data about how consumers actually behave and make purchasing decisions - to flow directly into Smartly's campaign and creative workflows. Before this integration, those segments could inform planning decisions, but activating them in live campaigns required separate steps, separate platforms, and the operational friction of rebuilding audience definitions each time. The API eliminates that gap.

The practical consequence is what Smartly and Horizon are describing as a continuous feedback loop. Audience segments enter the system via the API. Smartly's campaign optimization and creative capabilities then act on those segments in real time. Performance data from live campaigns can, in principle, cycle back to inform how future segments are constructed or refined. The loop connects intelligence to execution to outcome in a way that siloed workflows cannot.

Early campaign results

According to the announcement, the integration is already delivering measurable results in early campaigns. Smartly reported nearly double the creative engagement compared to standard audience approaches, and a 35% reduction in cost per order. These figures come from Smartly, are unverified by a third party, and should be read with that context in mind. The specific client or product category involved was not named.

The engagement figure - nearly 2x higher creative engagement than standard audience approaches - points to a specific hypothesis: that audience intelligence, when applied directly to creative optimization rather than just media targeting, changes which creative variants reach which people and increases the likelihood of an interaction. The cost-per-order figure of minus 35% suggests the efficiency gain extends beyond top-of-funnel metrics into transactional outcomes, though the campaign conditions underlying that figure were not disclosed.

The workflow: from insight to activation

Understanding what this integration actually changes requires a closer look at how these two systems typically operate separately. Horizon's Blu platform, built within the HorizonOS infrastructure, houses audience intelligence derived from how consumers make decisions. That intelligence has historically been most useful at the planning stage - helping agencies identify which audiences to prioritize and how to allocate media budgets across channels.

Smartly, meanwhile, manages the execution layer. According to the company, it supports more than 800 brands and manages over $7 billion in ad spend globally. Its platform unifies creative production, media activation, and performance optimization within a single workflow. Brands manage campaigns across social, commerce, and CTV from one interface. Strategic partnerships span Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, Spotify, and TikTok. PwC-validated results cited in Smartly's materials include a 5.5x return on ad spend and 42 minutes saved per hour of campaign management work.

The Blu Audience API integration connects these two previously separate layers. According to Smartly, the partnership makes it the first SaaS platform to bring Blu segments into campaign execution via the API - a specific technical distinction that separates API-based SaaS activation from bespoke or one-off data-sharing arrangements that agencies sometimes build between proprietary tools. The implication is that the integration is repeatable and scalable across Smartly's client base, not just available for a specific Horizon client on a specific campaign.

Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly, described the value in operational terms. "Audience intelligence is even more valuable when you have the ability to quickly act on it," Desmond said. "By bringing Blu audiences directly into Smartly, we're helping brands move faster from insight to activation in real time, and turn that into stronger performance across every channel."

Context: where this sits in a busy week for Smartly

The Horizon Media partnership was not the only announcement Smartly made today. The company simultaneously unveiled Smartly Synapse, a separate product that the partnership announcement referenced but did not detail. The two launches together suggest a deliberate product and partnership push timed to coincide with the Cannes Lions festival, which begins June 23, 2026 - the day after this announcement.

The timing is not coincidental. Cannes Lions has become the staging ground for major structural announcements in advertising, as PPC Land reported in its roundup of the week before the festival, which documented a dense cluster of agentic and infrastructure launches from Yahoo, Fox, Horizon Media, LiveRamp, Stagwell, and DoubleVerify within a 72-hour window. Horizon Media's own agentic software layer - which allows its buying agents to interact with agents from Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob, Smartly, and others - was disclosed in that same period.

The Smartly-Horizon Blu partnership sits alongside but is distinct from that agentic layer disclosure. The Blu Audience API integration is about bringing proprietary audience data into creative and campaign workflows. The agentic layer is about autonomous buying agents interacting with each other. The two announcements together suggest Horizon is simultaneously building out both its data activation architecture and its autonomous buying infrastructure - parallel tracks rather than the same product.

For Smartly, the Horizon partnership continues a pattern of platform expansions that PPC Land has tracked over the past twelve months. In November 2025, the company introduced Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, two AI-powered creative intelligence products using computer vision and eye-tracking models to evaluate attention patterns before campaigns launch. In March 2026, it integrated with Amazon DSP to extend AI-powered creative optimization to Prime Video and Fire TV. Also in March, it signed a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based incrementality measurement platform. More recently, it connected to the Roku Ads API to let performance marketers run CTV campaigns through familiar social workflows.

The broader shift: audience data leaving the planning silo

The Smartly-Horizon announcement is one instance of a wider structural change that has been building across the industry. Proprietary data assets - audience segments, shopper intelligence, first-party behavioral data - are increasingly being made available via API to activation platforms that can act on them in real time. The pattern has appeared in retail media, in agency data platforms, and now in independent media agency audience intelligence.

Teads and Havas Media Network announced a similar structural deal on June 2, 2026, integrating Teads' Audience Planning API into Havas's Converged.AI platform. That deal, live in six markets, eliminated the manual audience rebuilds that had historically separated media planning from campaign execution. The parallels are close: in both cases, an audience definition constructed in a planning environment flows directly into an activation platform via API, removing the re-entry step.

The problem being solved in both cases is what might be called interpretation drift - the gap that opens when a planner builds an audience definition in one system and a trafficking team then reconstructs it in another. Each reconstruction introduces the possibility of divergence from the original intent. API-based direct feeds eliminate that step.

Research Smartly published with EMARKETER in July 2025 - covered at the time by PPC Land - found that 72% of marketers reuse or slightly modify creative assets across platforms, while only 25% tailor creative for both social and CTV. That finding pointed to workflow friction as a structural barrier. The Blu Audience API integration addresses a parallel form of friction: the operational gap between where audience intelligence is created and where it can be activated.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For advertisers who work with Horizon Media agencies, the integration means Blu audience segments can now flow directly into Smartly-managed campaigns without requiring custom technical work on each engagement. The API architecture means the connection is repeatable.

For the wider advertising market, the announcement adds another data point to the argument that proprietary audience intelligence is becoming infrastructure rather than just insight. The trend accelerates as agencies invest in building audience platforms - Horizon with Blu, Havas with its convergence stack, others with their own data products - and then seek activation partners who can operationalize those segments at scale.

The question the early results raise is how generalizable they are. The 2x engagement and 35% cost-per-order improvement figures come from early campaigns under unspecified conditions. Whether those results hold across different product categories, campaign objectives, and audience types is not yet established. What the announcement does demonstrate is that closing the gap between audience planning and creative execution is achievable via API at the platform level - and that both parties believe the performance case is strong enough to build a formal partnership around.

Smartly's position as the first SaaS activation partner for Blu is also a competitive signal. Other ad tech platforms managing large volumes of spend across social and CTV will face questions from agencies and brands about whether they offer comparable access to proprietary audience intelligence from major agency holding companies. The Smartly-Horizon arrangement sets a reference point for what that access looks like in practice.

Timeline

  • July 2025 - Smartly and EMARKETER publish research finding 72% of marketers reuse or slightly modify creative assets across social and CTV, while only 25% tailor creative for both channels. PPC Land coverage
  • September 3, 2025 - Smartly announces integration with Spotify Ads Manager, enabling advertisers to manage audio, display, and video campaigns through its platform. PPC Land coverage
  • October 2025 - Smartly appoints Maxwell Tang as Chief Product Officer, Melissa Yang as SVP of Ecosystems and AI Applications, and Julie Green as SVP of Global Customer Success. PPC Land coverage
  • November 18, 2025 - Smartly introduces Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, two AI-powered creative intelligence products using computer vision and eye-tracking models. PPC Land coverage
  • March 2, 2026 - Smartly announces integration with Amazon DSP, extending AI-powered creative optimization and campaign management to Prime Video, Fire TV, and third-party publisher inventory. PPC Land coverage
  • March 10, 2026 - Smartly opens a product, engineering, and commercial hub in Mexico City, joining a network of 17 regional offices globally. PPC Land coverage
  • March 16, 2026 - Smartly signs a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based AI-powered incrementality measurement platform. PPC Land coverage
  • June 2, 2026 - Teads announces integration of its Audience Planning API into Havas Media Network's Converged.AI platform, eliminating manual audience rebuilds between planning and execution in six markets. PPC Land coverage
  • June 18, 2026 - Horizon Media discloses it has built an agentic software layer allowing its buying agents to interact with agents from Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob, Smartly, and others. PPC Land coverage
  • June 18, 2026 - Smartly announces integration with Roku Ads API, connecting its platform to Roku Ads Manager for CTV campaign management within social advertising workflows. PPC Land coverage
  • June 22, 2026 - Smartly and Horizon Media Holdings announce expanded partnership making Smartly the first SaaS platform activation partner to bring Blu audience segments into campaign workflows via Blu Audience API across social, commerce, and CTV.

Summary

Who: Smartly, the AI-powered advertising technology platform managing over $7 billion in ad spend globally for more than 800 brands, and Horizon Media Holdings, the privately held parent company of Horizon Media, the largest independent media agency globally.

What: An expanded partnership making Smartly the first SaaS platform activation partner to bring Blu audience segments directly into social, commerce, and CTV campaign workflows via the Blu Audience API. The integration enables a continuous feedback loop between Horizon's proprietary audience intelligence and Smartly's creative optimization and media performance capabilities. Early campaigns reported nearly double the creative engagement compared to standard audience approaches and a 35% reduction in cost per order, according to Smartly.

When: The announcement was made on June 22, 2026, from New York.

Where: The integration operates across social, commerce, and connected TV channels, including Google, through Smartly's existing campaign and creative workflows. The Blu Audience API serves as the technical connection between HorizonOS's audience intelligence platform and Smartly's activation layer.

Why: Audience intelligence built in planning environments has historically stopped at the insight stage, requiring manual rebuilding in activation platforms and creating operational friction and interpretation drift. The Blu Audience API integration eliminates that gap by enabling Horizon's proprietary audience segments to flow directly into live campaign execution within Smartly's platform, connecting insight to activation to outcome in a single workflow.