Horizon’s Blu AI platform focuses on being a transparent business consultancy
By Michael Bürgi • December 10, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
As each holding company and agency rushes to assemble its own version of an AI-driven platform, Horizon Media is pitching its version, Blu, as kind of the anti-black box consultancy that helps clients not only build campaigns but find pools of customers they may otherwise have missed.
Overseen by Bob Lord, Horizon Media’s president, and run by Domenic Venuto, Horizon’s chief product and data officer, Blu is essentially a content marketing platform that uses a variety of LLMs to help the independent agency’s clients determine broader business goals through the prism of media (creative inputs will come later — and more on that later), only on steroids.
Blu first launched in 2020 as an advanced data platform employing various machine learning elements. But it’s evolved to become a soup-to-nuts form of consultancy for clients using it. Those clients include retailers like Bob’s Discount Furniture to grocery chains like Wegmans and telecomms companies like Spectrum. Venuto described it as “AI native” meaning built from scratch, instead of on top of legacy systems.
It’s meant to tap into and out of the various main LLMs, given the speed with which they are updating themselves — all while using TransUnion data as the data spine. Lord said one essential element to bringing speed to the process while not sacrificing quality of data is to organize the data in a flat lattice structure. Older data sets were set up in rows of tables, making them harder for AI to read. “In the new AI landscape, actually architecting data in a way that the LLM can access the data easily is actually the magic around the speed,” said Lord.
The system is meant to operate within each client’s data walls, said Lord, which he considers an important distinction from the competition. “Client A owns their data — It’s on their their own cloud … As the platform learns, it learns Client A’s way. Therefore those models stay within the client, which gives them a competitive advantage … My competitors don’t do that. They will reuse models for clients on their behalf, and they pool the models together.”
Blu is built with transparency in mind, where all sources that the LLMs derive information from are listed alongside prompt results. “If you’re not transparent about the data source, where it came from, what it is, how it was trained, what the model looked like, you’re not going to have good acceptance, because people then aren’t going to trust the system,” said Lord.
And the main focus is on building audiences, either understanding existing customers better or finding prospective customers, explained Zach Claisse, vp of data solutions at Horizon, who calls himself a “client architect” and sits between the business solutions team and the product team.
With each client, Blu can be used as a business consultancy too, analyzing the client’s business, the competition as well as customers, both existent and potential. For example, a supermarket client might use Blu to deteremine where to open new stores given customer potential, then craft a media plan for when that store opens. “When we’re thinking of our media strategy, we’re putting forth the most optimal plan that’s going to actually move the business forward, and not just hitting front end media metrics,” said Claisse.
“This is where we’re going from just agency of record to being more of a growth agency, where we’ve got the tools and capabilities to answer business questions that extend beyond just the media, the traditional media questions that we were responsible for,” added Venuto.
At least one client that’s been using Blu corroborates the broader consultancy appeal the platform offers it. “We can build our own audiences just for analysis purposes — build dashboards and develop modeling so that we can answer questions that are not just for targeting with this certain ad,” said Lauren Pearson, director of CRM at Bob’s Discount Furniture. “Instead, we can answer questions that meet our internal business needs, like, what is this type of customer interested in beyond just furniture? Where else are they shopping? What is their browsing behavior? … It really kind of moves horizon more towards almost being kind of a business consultancy than just an agency.”
Eventually, the platform will encompass creative input too, said Venuto, and is piloting a partnership to access and optimize creative by plugging in through APIs or MCPs — and agentic options. “We see an opportunity use technology to play with creative assembly and disassembly, scoring and generation, and use those signals to feed into the media and vice versa,” said Venuto.
