Bob: Clients should own their data insights and the models built on top of that data. If a brand’s consumers were used to train a new model, that model is the brand’s intellectual property.
Mark: How do the platforms take that?
Bob: The brands love it. With platforms, you have to go in and ask. Amazon and Google are opening clean rooms. A brand spending $800 million to $1 billion has leverage, but if it just writes a check and says it’s happy with performance, nothing changes.
Mark: For brands, showing up in answer engines is the new SEO. How is Horizon approaching AEO?
Bob: We hired people from OpenAI and built Blue GEO, which aggregates tools like Profound and Bluefish to show where you rank, then gives you action items. Answer engines reward recency and relevancy, so you need an explicit content strategy, which can be funded with search budgets.
Mark: Where do creators and social fit in?
Bob: One brand we work with actually merged its social and search practices. The CMO believes managing them together will improve its rankings. If your influencer marketing and paid social have the most recent, relevant content, that’s where answer engines go looking. Honestly, we’re speed-running early search, when nobody knew the algorithms.
Mark: What happens to ad tech middlemen as agents arrive?
Bob: The companies that did matchmaking and took a fee go away. An agent will say, “Here are the audiences you want.” The brand says yes, buy them, and everyone else drops out. Ad safety and validation will evolve, but the pure intermediaries will not survive.
Mark: Doesn’t intermediation always find a way to recreate itself?
Bob: The technology is far more accessible now. In the programmatic wave, a brand couldn’t set up a private marketplace itself. It needed a third party. Theoretically, an agent can do that now. So I’m optimistic.
Pulled Quotes
“Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? They’re all chips.”
Former President George H. W. Bush, in an apocryphal line dismissing computer chips
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“I want to go like Rupert Murdoch mode if he wasn’t like a tiny little Australian chud.”
Nolita Dirtbag creator Alex Hartman, on his blossoming media ambitions
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“At the end of the day, we’re providing the consumer the same balance of chocolate and peanut butter we’ve always had in our classic recipe.”
Hershey’s R&D senior director Shawn Houser-Fedor, rebutting allegations that its chocolate has changed
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“I love Texas. I love H-E-B. I love my family, and I love Whataburger, probably in that order.”
weighing his affections for Texas against the conservative takeover of the University of Texas
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