A year after Unilever, the ad-funded creator economy is still catching up to its own ambition

The creator economy had been waiting for a moment like this.

For years, influencer marketing had occupied an awkward position on media plans – big enough to matter, not established enough to defend. The measurement was patchy. The contracts were informal. The boardroom case was hard to make. 

Then in March 2025, Fernando Fernández walked into his first weeks as Unilever CEO and handed the industry exactly what it had been asking for: a declaration, from one of the world’s largest advertisers, that creators were now the centre of gravity. Fifty percent of the media budget to social. Twenty times more creators. One influencer in every postcode in India, every municipality in Brazil. 

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Media Buying Briefing: Horizon’s Bob Lord on the ways agencies have to adapt to survive today

The word transparency is bandied about across the media and marketing world, with marketers demanding it (or so they say), and agencies and tech firms insisting they deliver it. But it all feels sometimes like kabuki theater, with larger-than-life protestations and apparent action, but little substance behind what’s being expressed. 

That’s been a bugaboo for Bob Lord, veteran media executive who a year ago joined Horizon Media Holdings as president and has been a principal architect of the independent media agency group’s AI strategy. Lord delivered a keynote address to the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience X Science conference in New York last week, addressing what he sees as a lack of transparency in the entire sector — but something that AI can address and improve. 

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