Bob Lord

Xbox gets into the TV biz; Meta is testing a new monetization model; and who wants to be a hold, anyway?

Food and beverage brands have gone off the rails with choosing trendy social marketing terms over truthfulness. Plus: Horizon Global, the joint venture between Horizon Media and Havas, is not gaining too much traction.

Agencies are differentiating their tech stacks by building custom agentic AI tools for their clients. And they’re rethinking owning those AI tools – particularly since licensing them creates new revenue streams.

According to Horizon Media’s Bob Lord, most agencies are trying to solve the wrong problem by obsessing over cost efficiency at a time when AI has quietly unlocked something far more valuable: the ability to become a growth partner to advertisers.

Domenic Venuto, indie agency Horizon Media’s chief product and data officer, sat down with AdExchanger during POSSIBLE at the Fontainebleau in Miami to unpack the role of AI in today’s media and advertising landscape.

As the newly appointed president of Horizon Media Holdings, Bob Lord is dubious that megamergers between holding companies are actually good for the client. “Bigger is not always better,” Lord says.

ADT tracks a bespoke metric called “marketing cost per installation” that measures the impact of media on what ADT cares most about: the roughly 1 million alarms its technicians install every year.

T-Mobile may be considering an acquisition in the mobile data market; Google’s glitch shuts down ads for a weekend; and ad tech’s old guard is salivating over AI startups.

Marketers who are curious about the bias in their campaign targeting can put their media plans to the test by running them through a free open-source toolkit built by IBM. The idea behind using the tool, dubbed the Advertising Toolkit for AI Fairness 360, is to stay a step ahead of regulation by making sure the ad industry roots out bias in campaign planning, especially the invisible kind that can be amplified by a reliance on data segments (even a marketer’s first-party data) and black box algorithms.

Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  Brands have long been sold the vision that artificial intelligence will one day supercharge their marketing plans, but results have been […]

IBM has been banging the drum for years about the role artificial intelligence can play to support everything from cancer treatment to retail personalization. More recently, though, IBM has started to prioritize practical advertising applications of its cognitive computing system, Watson. Last month, IBM brought its AI to ad tech through partnerships with Xandr, Magnite, […]

Think of IBM and you’re likely imagining heavy technologies managed by an expensive services division. But IBM Chief Digital Officer Bob Lord emphasizes that’s the old company. He’s here to help IBM reinvent itself and, most importantly, its way of doing business. “What I’ve loved doing throughout my career is helping a company pivot,” Lord […]

After many years in leadership roles at media agencies, Jordan Bitterman will move to the brand and media side as chief marketing officer of The Weather Co., the IBM-owned company said Wednesday. Bitterman brings extensive knowledge of how media companies can drive efficiencies in the data-driven milieu. He said The Weather Co. is in a […]

IBM has nabbed Bob Lord, who formerly served as president of AOL and global CEO at Publicis-owned Razorfish, as its chief digital officer. Lord is one of the few executives with experience running companies in both marketing services and advertising technology, a nexus where IBM has been making large bets lately. An IBM spokesperson said […]

Tim Armstrong is going to have to look for a new successor. The AOL CEO’s heir apparent, the highly visible Bob Lord, will soon step down from the company, which he joined two years ago to help spearhead an aggressive expansion of the company’s ad technology vision. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news […]

If data is currency, then it’s no wonder most companies lock it in a safe (unless you’re Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which case you just put it on a Word document somewhere). But this can be a tremendous point of frustration for brands that want to use the data housed by the big dogs of […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Bob Lord, CEO at AOL Platforms.  While the term “disruption” has become a bit of a cliché, there’s no denying that technology is radically reshaping the ad industry. Investments in […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Bob Lord, CEO at AOL Platforms. The annual whirlwind of Advertising Week events, when nearly 100,000 advertisers, agencies, media and marketing companies converge in New York, always presents a fantastic […]

During a Q&A with AdExchanger’s Director of Research Joanna O’Connell at the Industry Preview 2014 conference, interactive agency veteran and AOL Networks CEO Bob Lord discussed AOL’s moves into programmatic, its emphasis on video through marketplace provider Adap.tv, the importance of cross-device advertising and the need to make ad tech in general less confusing and […]

Its $405 million acquisition of video ad marketplace Adap.tv closes two big loops for AOL. The first is around video, which has become a bigger part of both its and rival Yahoo’s strategies. Both portals have doubled down on original video content creation, but AOL has looked to video as an ad-tech solution, whereas Yahoo […]

The growing demand for personalized, “real-time marketing” (think: the doings of Oreo and its digital agency 360i that resulted in “Dunk in the Dark” during the Super Bowl), is one of the forces underpinning the push toward unifying the “human” and “technological” elements of the programmatic equation. AOL’s earlier announcement of a new strategic partnership […]

Bob Lord is leaving his twin posts as Global CEO of Razorfish and CEO of Publicis Groupe’s Digital Technologies Division to take on the role of CEO of AOL Networks, a post that has been vacant since April when former head Ned Brody exited in April for Yahoo, pending his non-compete. However, Lord, who joined […]