CANNES – It’s a particularly complicated and challenging time for agencies and their marketer clients. This is why Horizon Media’s Bill Koenigsberg tries to keep things simple. Clients want transparency, speed to market, integration “and they want you dealing with business outcomes,” the President, CEO & Founder of Horizon says in this interview at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
His take on the media supply chain strikes a familiar and recurring refrain. “When you think about all the people that touch that food chain, we’ve got to get to a much better place in terms of performance metrics and transparency,” Koenigsberg says.
He defines transparency as “all sides sharing information. If we can get to the that place, I believe that the seller community, the publishers, the linear TV suppliers, the other platforms will end up all working toward business outcome solutions for clients.”
Koenigsberg differs from many in advertising and media who have been advocating for a uniform way to measure campaigns across media and platforms. He envisions a far more fluid landscape.
“You may end up having 100 different metrics, all these different KPI’s, but that’s fine. I think AI will help that. And if we can move in that direction, that’s where the world needs to go. That’s where the business needs to go.”
After building Horizon for the past 29 years based on an integrated business service model rather than the a la carte offerings of the biggest holding companies, Koeingsberg’s creation is now ranked #2 in the U.S. in terms of scale. However, with the rise of digital media, scale isn’t the be-all-end-all it was touted to be a decade or so ago.
“I’d rather be ranked in terms of being best in general as opposed to scale, because I don’t think scale says it all,” he says.
He ticks off a list of holding company legacy shortcomings and figures that the model he chose happens to be “the model of today.” But he’s not fully satisfied.
While being consistent has helped, “If anybody thinks that once they’ve reached that plateau they can rest on their laurels, that’s the time to change. We are relooking at our whole structure today.”
If he were to start from scratch, he’d want even more integration. “I believe that our teams should be led by business solution experts. I believe that the business solution expert should own everything. Content, data analytics, insights, tactical planning, data analysis with one cohesive integrated group.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
