Bob Lord wants agencies to stop charging clients for headcount. The president of independent agency Horizon Media Holdings attacked labor-based pricing models onstage at Smartly's Advance event in Lower Manhattan, arguing that full-time-equivalent pricing and principal-based buying protect holding-company economics at clients' expense.

"You have to create composable architectures" to drive clients' business growth, Lord said. "What's holding us back? Inertia."

He named the targets directly. "It's the old system: FTE-based models, principal-based buying — how the holdcos make their money," he said.

Lord, who joined Horizon in 2023 after serving as IBM's chief digital officer and previously leading publicisgroupe's digital operations, framed the critique as economics rather than personal criticism. "You've made investments in technology over the last five years," he said of the holding companies. "You need to monetize that investment, and you're going to force it on your clients."

He told the audience he was "not picking on anyone," but simply highlighting "an economic equation."

The remarks sharpen a debate that has run through the agency business for years. FTE-based pricing ties agency compensation to staffing hours, which critics say rewards putting more people on a client's business rather than delivering outcomes. Principal-based buying, in which agencies buy media inventory themselves and resell it to clients at a margin, has drawn scrutiny from marketers and auditors who argue it obscures how much of the client's money reaches publishers.

Lord's answer is what he calls composable architecture: assembling technology, data and services in modular ways that can adapt to a client's growth needs. That position aligns with Horizon's standing as the largest independent media agency in the US, a structure that lets it avoid the investor pressure facing WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Interpublic and Dentsu to squeeze returns from technology investments made across their networks.

The critique lands at a moment when holding companies are pitching their own transformation stories. Omnicom is closing its acquisition of Interpublic, a deal executives have justified partly through technology scale and data platforms. Publicis has told investors its Sapient and Epsilon assets justify premium pricing. Lord's comments put the burden of proof on those models: if the technology works, he implied, agencies should price for the outcomes it produces rather than the hours and inventory margins it replaces.

For Horizon, the argument doubles as a sales pitch. Independence lets the agency build its stack around client problems instead of shareholder returns, Lord has argued since taking the president role. The Lower Manhattan remarks give that pitch its sharpest formulation yet — and put agency pricing models back at the center of the industry's next round of client reviews.