• by Joe Mandese , January 4, 2026

Full disclosure: Before naming Horizon Media’s Bob Lord our executive of the year, the editors of MediaPost were deadlocked over selecting the agency for one or more of the other three categories we are bestowing this year: media agency, independent agency and holding company.

In the end, we felt Lord’s achievements in 2025 best illustrated the Big 3 criteria we use as the foundation for our awards -- vision, innovation and industry leadership -- and that he was the best individual agency executive exemplifying them over the past year.

I’ll explain our rationale for that momentarily, but first I’d like to explain why I’m disclosing our consideration set and why we could have picked Horizon for any one of the other categories, particularly holding company of the year.

It’s almost a cliche by now to describe 2025 as a year of transformation -- not just for the world but for the advertising and media services industry in particular. You will see that referenced in our other awards profiles, because all of them illustrate how the winners applied their vision, innovated and, we believe, led the industry in not just dealing with the disruptive nature of 2025, but leveraging it to come out with new operating and business models designed for the future -- not just 2026, but beyond.

As with any of our winners, we cannot guarantee they will pull it off, but we are recognizing them for at least putting things in place to make it happen.

No slight to independent agency PMG or media agency MRM, but it would have been easy to name Horizon for those categories this year based on its own merits, although we think both those other shops are demonstrating all three criteria in new and distinctive ways and I encourage you to read our rationalizations for them as well.

As for "holding company," I know some will say, “What, Horizon? It’s an independent media-buying service?” My reply: Is it really?

Historically, the ad trade’s criteria for defining a holding company is that they were big, publicly traded, and used their access to capital to acquire other agencies, roll them up and rinse and repeat over and over again to gain market share and consolidate the business.

And although the biggest traditional agency holding company player did even more of that last year -- acquiring Interpublic -- it is important to remember that even after that consolidation, Omnicom represents a fraction of ad spending as well as ad talent, and will increasingly own a declining share of both, even if it is the biggest fish in an ever-expanding pond.

When I started covering the ad industry nearly half a century ago, I did an analysis of the then Big 6 holding companies’ share of the advertising marketplace and was shocked to learn they represented less than half of U.S. and/or global ad spending. Today, it is well under 25%.

So share of market no longer is a reliable indicator of what constitutes an agency holding company.

We can debate whether public market capital or the kind of private-equity capital Horizon has is a true differentiator for a holding company, but my bottom line is that the real factor is that it is an organization that acquires other organizations, rolls them up, and leverages new capital and operating cash flow to keep repeating that process. And in that regard, Horizon does not fit the definition.

That’s mainly because it has created its diversified portfolio of operating companies from scratch, or even better, from joint ventures with complementary partners.

In the past, they were partnerships with individuals that had their own unique IP -- Pitbull (Armando Christian Pérez), Katie Couric, etc. -- but one of the deals Lord masterminded during 2025 was a joint venture with Havas creating a new operating company -- Horizon Global -- that complements each of the partners' ability to generate new, organic growth, strengthening Havas' media base in the U.S., and Horizon’s internationally.

Rumors that the partnership might ultimately lead to a more formalized ownership structure have so far been denied, but those things sometimes change, and I for one wouldn’t be surprised to see Horizon make a bid -- possibly a successful one -- this year to acquire its first big outside holding: Dentsu International, which its Japanese-based holding company has put on the block.

If that or another similar outside acquisition were to occur, I can tell you the editors of MediaPost would add Horizon to our “holding company” list. But for now, I’m suggesting Horizon is a new -- possibly improved -- holding-company model. One that is not beholden to the capricious support of public shareholders, and one that only looks outside when it is an opportunity to expand and diversify in a way that doesn’t risk capital, but enhances it.

Now that I’ve made my case for why Horizon was not our holding company of the year -- yet -- let me explain why Lord’s efforts in 2025 put it in place to be one this year or another one soon.

Let’s start with Horizon Global. Yes, on the surface it is an opportunistic joint venture for two like-minded organizations to create incremental growth, but complementing each other’s market weaknesses. But more than that, it is a cultural fit, and from what we understand, it is taking on legs that go well beyond rainmaking.

It is also building -- or in the case of Horizon’s pre-existing centralized consumer identity hub, Horizon Blu, it was more of a rebuild.

And Lord -- one of the industry’s OG digital natives with a 40-year track record spanning Razorfish, Publicis, AOL and IBM -- had the chops to do it, assembling a team that effectively reengineered Blu from an undifferentiated and un-integrated data hub, to a from-the-ground-up, fully integrated data engine feeding every operating unit as well as Horizon clients directly to both anticipate and fulfill their consumer targeting, sentiment and trends information requests in near-real time.

Importantly, the reengineered Blu is completely aligned with Havas Media’s proprietary consumer data hub, and both organizations boast the fact that unlike the other big agencies, their systems are 100% “open source,” capable of integrating with flexibly integrating with any and all third-party consumer data sources, including first-party ones of their clients -- and that it is more the wave of the future than the walled systems developed by other agencies.

Toward year-end, and after we already named Lord our executive of the year, Horizon broke new news -- as part of an agency tech round-up story in a rival publication -- that it had launched “HorizonOS,” which its press release touted as the ad industry’s “first open operating system designed for client growth.”

While I was not able to vet the hyperbole at presstime, it was disappointing to see Horizon announcing that kind of obligatory rhetoric just as we were about to go to press on our awards profile, but we’ll see how those claims manifest as part of Horizon’s overall proposition in the year(s) ahead.

I will say this, though -- Horizon's founder-CEO Bill Koenigsberg did tip that hand during a one-on-one briefing with me, largely discussing MediaPost’s rationale for naming Lord our exec of the year -- and not naming Horizon to one of the other categories.

But he demurred on what HorizonOS actually was, or how it was built on the backbone of Blu, etc., so I can’t really tell you that.

What I will say is that Koenigsberg took exception to my description of Blu being rebooted, and said “It’s more of an evolution,” so I suspect we will see further iterations of that in the future.

Lastly, I’d like to remind you that we previously named Koenigsberg our executive of the year two years ago, precisely for recognizing that Horizon needed to bring someone like Lord in to help transform Horizon into the “holding company of the future.”

And two years later, it looks like he accomplished that, so in a way, this is his award too.