Bill Koenigsberg
Founder, Chairman & CEO at horizon media
Bill Koenigsberg is the founder, chairman and CEO of Horizon Media, the largest privately-held independent media agency in the world. He has led the company continuously since founding it in 1989 and is a frequent industry voice on the value of independence versus holding-company consolidation. In 2014 he became the first media-agency executive to chair the 4A's board.
Bill Koenigsberg is one of the few founder-CEOs of a top-five U.S. media agency still running the shop he started. Horizon Media’s defining trait — independence in a sector that has consolidated into a small handful of holding companies — is also Koenigsberg’s defining argument: he is the industry’s most consistent public voice for the proposition that an agency owned by its operators, not by Omnicom or Publicis or WPP, can move faster, hold talent longer, and keep client trust closer.
That argument has carried him into the trade-body machinery as well. In 2014 he became the first media-agency executive elected chair of the 4A’s board, a structural shift in a body historically led by creative-shop principals. He served the full two-year term and was succeeded in October 2017 by Greg Stern of BSSP. Five years later, the AAF inducted him into the Advertising Hall of Fame.