Lord: ‘be prepared for the pivot’

Horizon Media Holdings president Bob Lord thinks marketers are about to hit “the biggest fundamental pivot that we’ve ever seen in this industry”.

“When you think about traditional marketing, you think about the funnel, about brand marketing versus performance marketing. All of that has collapsed,” Lord told Lions Daily News.

“The good news is that the technology that is available to us now, as marketers, will allow us to be much more transparent in what we know.”

Lord cited the famous John Wanamaker maxim about half the money you spend on advertising being wasted, but that you don’t know which half. “At this point now, we can figure out which half is really being effective, and spend our money more on the half that’s working than on the half that’s not,” said Lord.

Lord offered brisk criticism of the way “the legacy agencies have built their systems based on the old marketing processes”, claiming that their investment in those systems means they will force clients to use them, even if they become rapidly outdated.

“If you’re a marketer, you need to own your own technology stack. You need to own the data that’s in the technology stack. And what’s more important is that now, if I own the data, I own the insight into my consumer,” Lord said.

“Now think about the models: the decision models, the LLMs that get created on top of that data. You need to own those models also. At Horizon Media, we allow you not only

to own the data, but we also allow you to own the model on top of it.”

“Think about Meta. I could write a cheque to Mark Zuckerberg and say ‘okay, go do my marketing for me’. But he’s keeping all the data insights, he’s keeping all the model intelligence, and he’s just bringing back results,” he said.

“You could be happy as a marketer: ‘I got great results!’ But you’ve learned nothing about your consumer.”