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Here's a fun game: Try explaining Bob Lord's career arc to someone outside advertising without sounding like you're describing a fever dream.

"So this guy ran Razorfish, which Microsoft bought, then he sold it to Publicis, then became president of AOL during the Verizon acquisition, then left advertising entirely to become a senior vice president at IBM where he learned about quantum computing and large language models for eight years, and now he's back as President of Horizon Media—one of the largest independent media agencies in the country, with over $10 billion in billings."

Your friend's response, inevitably: "Why would anyone leave advertising and then come back?"

That's the question, isn't it?

Bob Lord didn't tiptoe out of advertising. He sprinted. In 2016, IBM came calling, and he dove headfirst into a world of neural networks, quantum computing, and supply chain software so sophisticated you could track a single product floating somewhere in the South China Sea and tell someone exactly when it would dock in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, back in advertising? "I still couldn't tell a marketer how their campaign ran in the last week," Lord told me. "Something went wrong."

That's the kind of observation that either makes you cynical or makes you want to fix things. Lord, apparently, chose door number two.

When he returned to the industry at the start of 2025 as President of Horizon Media, he found it worse than when he left. More ad tech vendors. More data companies. More martech platforms. More confusion. More complexity. Less clarity. The industry had spent a decade building an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine and forgotten what it was supposed to be making.

"In my mind," Lord says, with the calm of someone who has thought about this for a very long time, "the agency inertia model held everyone back from actually innovating."

Lord's resume reads like someone playing career bingo with a blindfold on. East Region President at Razorfish. Global CEO when Microsoft owned it. Sold it to Publicis. Ran AOL Platforms. Became AOL's President. Watched the company get acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion. Then—in what most people would consider the victory lap phase—decided that learning about quantum computing at IBM sounded more interesting than anything advertising had to offer.

At IBM, he wasn't just collecting a paycheck. He ran a $4 billion portfolio. Managed the ecosystem business. Got what he calls "steeped in large language models, neural networks and AI, quantum computing." Learned how software actually gets built around these technologies.

And then, at the beginning of this year, he came back to Horizon Media, an independent agency founded by Bill Konigsberg on a principle so simple it's almost subversive: If we get a credit back from a media company, we pass it on to the client.

"At the core of Horizon Media is a philosophy and a culture of transparency," Lord says. It sounds like a platitude until you realize how few agencies would dare say it out loud, let alone build their business model around it.The Operating System

There's a phrase Lord picked up from Ginni Rometty, IBM's former CEO, that he keeps returning to like a mantra: "Growth and comfort don't coexist."

It sounds like something you'd see on a LinkedIn post with a sunrise photo, but Lord means it literally. Rometty was transforming IBM when he arrived, and the message was clear: If you're comfortable all the time, you're not growing. If you're not pushing yourself into unfamiliar territory, you're coasting.

Lord internalized it. He talks about being in the "muddy middle" at Horizon—knowing where he wants to go, not having all the answers, watching everyone's role change in real time. "There's a lot of uncertainty," he admits. "The question is, are you the kind of person that thrives on being uncomfortable to grow and learn?"

It's not a rhetorical question. He's watching to see who makes it through.

If you want to understand why Lord came back to advertising, you have to understand what he thinks is broken. And what's broken, in his telling, is pretty much everything about how agencies get paid.

"Even when you go and pitch right now," he says, "we're still talking about FTE models. How many people are going to have on the business? And therefore I'll compensate you appropriately."

He pauses, letting the absurdity land.

"If I can swap out technology and cut the staff by a third—shouldn't that be the model? Shouldn't I be actually bringing in best-of-breed technologies to do the marketing and distribution of marketing versus just having an FTE model?"

At Horizon, Lord is pitching clients on something different: performance-based compensation tied to actual business outcomes. Not marketing qualified leads. Not downloads. Actual transactions. Cars sold. Internet packages purchased. Widgets moved.

"I was at a pitch two weeks ago," he tells me, "and I said, 'I know you're asking me for an FTE retainer model. I'm going to put that in the proposal, but I'm also going to give you a performance model to consider.'"

Whether the client takes him up on it, he doesn't know yet. But he's planting the flag.

Here's the thing about Bob Lord: He wasn't born knowing that not everyone operates from goodness. He had to learn it the hard way.

The year was sometime in the early 1980s. Lord was 19 or 20, working on the factory floor at General Motors. The shop boss had a heart attack, and suddenly Lord was thrust into a shift supervisory role. The union boss came over with a stack of papers.

"Bob, I just need you to sign all these papers."

Lord signed them. Why wouldn't he? He trusted the guy.

The next day, every worker on the production line had brand new work boots.

"I had signed a work order to give everybody boots in the entire factory," Lord recalls. He got called up to the plant manager's office. He thought he was going to get fired.

He didn't get fired. But he did get a lesson that stuck with him for 40 years.

"You just can't trust everybody," he says now. "Everyone doesn't operate from the goodness of the core of doing the right thing for the business or doing the right thing for you." And that was a hard lesson.

Trust but verify. Or maybe: verify, then trust, and even then keep verifying.

There's another story Lord tells about being thrown into the deep end. Early in his career, he got the chance to run his first P&L—a small business in North Carolina, $20 million in revenue, part of a bigger company.

"That was the first time I ever had revenue all the way to profit responsibility," he says. "I had no idea how to hire people. I had no idea how to fire people. I had no idea how to run a sales department. And all of that was mine."

The company didn't care about his learning curve. They just wanted to know if he was going to make his numbers.

"That was probably the most exhausting and trying experience I ever had," he admits. But also: "I think that taught me a lot."

Being underwater. Not knowing the answers. Having to figure it out anyway. These are the experiences Lord keeps putting himself through, decade after decade. It's not masochism. It's the operating system.

Lord is 60-something years old and running one of the largest independent media agencies in the country. He sits on public boards (Integral Ad Science, Finance of America). He advises startups. He participates in the Clinton Global Initiative.

And yet here he is, back in the trenches of advertising, fighting about FTE models and trying to convince brands that they should pay agencies based on whether their products actually sell.

When I asked him what would make our conversation a "home run" three months from now, he didn't hesitate.

"I fundamentally want people to realize that this new technology and data strategy is fundamentally built to change how marketers communicate with their consumers," he said. "We are in the muddy middle. People just need to embrace this change and run with new models."

He wants to be seen as a leader around that change. Not a sage dispensing wisdom from a mountaintop. A leader—in the mud, figuring it out, making mistakes, adjusting.

Growth and comfort don't coexist. Neither do legends and easy answers.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on Bob Lord. Parts 2 and 3 are exclusive to ADOTAT+ subscribers and will dig into the specifics: the tactical blueprint for what Lord is building at Horizon, the framework for killing the FTE model, and his unvarnished take on what AI can and can't do for the industry.

[Subscribe to ADOTAT+ to continue reading →]

Here’s what you’re missing if you stop at the free version: why Bob Lord’s apology at CES wasn’t a vibe, it was a warning. The FTE model isn’t creaking. It’s already being priced out by AI, answer engines, performance comp, and clients who finally learned how to ask the right questions. Agencies that still sell headcount are about to look like travel agents explaining fax machines.

ADOTAT+ breaks down what actually matters: how discovery has already moved to ChatGPT and Reddit, why “content data lakes” are replacing SEO theater, how transparency becomes a weapon not a value, and where performance-based comp quietly redraws power between agencies, clients, and tech. Not theory. Playbooks. Tells. Incentives.

If your competitors are reading this and you’re not, you won’t lose overnight. You’ll just wake up six months from now wondering why the pitch dynamics changed and no one invited you into the room. Upgrade now