Horizon Media and Nielsen to launch multicultural planning platform

Horizon Media is launching a new multicultural communications and media planning platform developed with Nielsen to help marketers better reach diverse audiences.

The eMbrace platform—based on an idea from Horizon with software and data input from Nielsen—includes an upgraded panel size to better represent Asian, Black and Hispanic consumers. While eMbrace is a Horizon tool, the software and intellectual property behind it belong to Nielsen.

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The platform is an outgrowth of Project eMbrace, an initiative Horizon launched in 2020 to drive more inclusive planning and buying, said Karina Dobarro, executive VP and managing partner of multicultural at Horizon. “We worked on the architecture and the vision of what the tool should do for us and our clients, and we met with a number of data partners and felt that Nielsen was the best for us.”

“The problem we’re solving is the inherent bias that survey and panel-based tools have in communications planning,” said John Marson, senior VP and managing director of Horizon Media’s channel observance, research and development team. Insights and outcomes from planning tools often default to the largest segment of the population and “potentially leave voices, concerns and needs of other audience segments unheard or unaddressed,” he said.

“A lot of surveys and panels just don’t have enough respondents,” Marson said. “Nielsen agreed to boost our sample for us.”

The new platform creates Equity Index Scores that re-weights audience segment priorities within other Horizon planning tools, Marson said. Those are based on such factors as marketer priorities, brand health information that compares by population segment on how the brand is performing vs. competition, purchase intent and brand engagement metrics.

“The tool may tell us you’re doing really well with the Hispanic segment but you really need dialog with the Asian segment,” Dobarro said. “It will help us make the case for segments that don’t always receive support.”

Because eMbrace will be connected to existing Horizon communications planning and channel ranking tools, it will help generate media strategies around spending by marketing tactic and channel—whether, for instance, more should be spent on building awareness or closing sales with various population segments.

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“That will help us recalibrate where we should focus in the customer journey, so it’s not just based on the largest [segment of the] population but on the equity of all the segments,” Marson said.

The platform also will help measure progress for brands each year in reaching multicultural audiences and point the way to further improvements.

While eMbrace is informed by Nielsen panel and survey data, it can also bring in a brand’s first-party consumer data, any third-party data it has, plus incorporate any custom or third-party segmentation models brands use, he said.

Horizon is the first agency to “integrate this more robust data set,” Jay Nielsen, senior VP of planning products at Nielsen, said in a statement. “Through eMbrace, we’re expanding the sample population to include more diverse respondents, providing an unprecedented look at diverse customer segments to drive equity and growth to minority audiences in media."