Night Market looks to answer the call for better retail media metrics

The news: Horizon Media’s commerce agency Night Market has gained traction with its AI-powered predictive planning, budgeting, and performance optimization platform, Neon, since its June 2024 launch, helping clients generate 18% more in incremental revenues from more than $250 million in retail media investment.

The standalone SaaS platform addresses a key pain point for brands by offering independent, unified measurement standards that enable cross-retailer visibility, accurate incremental sales attribution, and other insights to reveal the true return on investment, not just media-attributed ROAS, on ad spend, Night Market president Randy Browning said at this week’s inaugural Commerce Media Brand Summit conference in Atlanta.

• Unlike traditional campaign management tools and marketing mix models, Neon provides real-time optimization adjustments, predictive ROI insights, and AI-driven recommendations down to the keyword level.
• This approach helps ensure that measurement reflects brands’ unique business dynamics rather than relying solely on retailer-supported metrics.

Brands across consumer packaged goods, beauty, electronics, home goods, and insurance have signed on as clients, the company said. Neon’s ability to tie media investments directly to revenue impact gives brands and retailers a strategic advantage. “Clients now have an independent, unified measurement view that they can invest in from a place of confidence,” Browning said.

AI for accuracy: Neon’s AI-powered system runs a mix of performance optimization models to predict opportunities for boosting incremental sales with an accuracy of 97.5%, Night Market said. The system improves on the limitations of last-click attribution by isolating organic sales from media-driven revenues.

Why it matters: As retail media and commerce media evolve, standardized measurement is becoming critical to help brands understand ROI. Traditional measurement practices often fall short of accurately reflecting the multifaceted nature of consumer behaviors and other touchpoints, resulting in confusing metrics that lack comparability.

Retail media ad expenditures are set to rise 20% this year to more than $62 billion, per our forecast, and brands want specific and actionable data on that spending.

• A majority (55%) of US advertisers cited the lack of uniform standards across platforms as their biggest retail media challenge, per a July 2024 ANA report.
• According to Skai’s 2025 State of Retail Media report, measurement innovations ranked second behind improved insights as a factor that would cause organizations to accelerate their investment in retail media.

Go deeper: Read our report, The State of Measurement in Retail Media.