PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – The modern CMO is no longer satisfied with charts about impressions and reach, according to Jeremy Flynn, head of product at Horizon Media. He said the job now extends well beyond buying ads and into proving that marketing actually grows the business.
“The demand from the CMO is changing beyond just marketing,” Flynn said in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting He added that brands want proof of performance growth, not just proof that money was spent. That shift, he said, has pushed agencies to focus less on execution mechanics and more on driving real outcomes for clients.
AI is baked into the product not sprinkled on top
Flynn described AI as a foundational layer across Horizon’s product strategy, particularly inside its Blue platform.
“AI is inherent in everything that we’re doing from a product development perspective,” he said.
Blue uses AI to onboard first-party and third-party data, streamline workflows and guide users from strategy through activation and measurement. The goal, Flynn said, is to make AI a constant companion that augments intelligence for both agency teams and brand marketers without turning the process into a black box.
Humans still have the ideas and the judgment
Despite the heavy use of automation, Flynn was quick to defend the human role in marketing.
“Humans still are the ones who have the ideas and the reasoning,” he said with a laugh. AI, he noted, simply allows teams to test far more hypotheses than before. Where marketers once ran a handful of experiments, they can now run hundreds, using AI to surface insights that humans can turn into action at scale.
Creative is finding its way back into media
Flynn argued that data and generative tools are helping media agencies reconnect with creative work after decades of separation.
“With AI and with data, we do see that we can start to bring creative back into the fold as a media agency,” he said.
Horizon’s approach focuses on using audience insight to inform what creative resonates, while partnering with external technologies for creative scoring and generative versioning. The aim is not to replace creative teams, but to give them sharper signals about what works.
Future belongs to the CMO and CFO power duo
Looking ahead, Flynn said the agency of the future will help marketing and finance finally speak the same language.
“Where it should go is how the CMO and the CFO become best friends,” he said.
He believes technology can connect marketing activity directly to financial outcomes, turning marketing into a clear engine of growth rather than a cost center. That means putting tools like Blue directly into the hands of both brands and agency teams so they can collaborate on decisions backed by data.
Signals matter but only if you can find them
On data, identity and signals, Flynn said the real challenge is separating insight from noise. He described Horizon as a steward of first party data that enriches those signals with identity and deep third party insights.
“How do you actually pull out the signal from the noise of all those really large data sets?” he said.
The answer lies in using AI to understand audience overlap, inform messaging and enable hyper personalization that meets consumers wherever they are, online or offline.
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