David Grenfell is Head of Performance Marketing at Future Publishing. We asked who his digital hero is.
Who is your digital hero?
My digital hero is Bill T. Gross, the visionary founder of GoTo.com, which later evolved into Overture Services.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
Bill Gross is my hero for inventing and championing the pay-per-click (PPC) model. Back in the ’90s, when digital ads were mostly just about “eyeballs,” he had this brilliant, game-changing idea: advertisers should only pay when someone actually clicks their ad. His search engine, where paid listings were auctioned off, completely flipped the script from branding to quantifiable performance.
This model, later refined by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, became the cornerstone of modern PPC and performance marketing as we all utilise today.
Even though I was just a kid back then, this model’s focus on direct, measurable results shaped my entire career before I’d even started it. It’s the very foundation that AI now amplifies, proving that digital can – and should – be all about direct response.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
Bill Gross’s heroism profoundly drove digital by creating a viable, performance-driven economic model. This fuelled the internet’s explosive growth and laid the groundwork for the AI era.
His innovation did three key things:
He pioneered the ROI-focused approach. The PPC model gave advertisers clear, trackable ROI, which is the exact analytical fuel modern AI needs to thrive. Without his foresight, today’s complex algorithms wouldn’t have the rich data to optimise against.
He monetised search. Gross made search engines profitable, helping them grow into the digital cornerstones they are today. This set the stage for all those sophisticated AI interactions we now take for granted.
He democratised advertising. PPC allowed businesses of any size to compete for visibility, paying only for genuinely interested prospects. This fostered a truly competitive environment. While Page and Brin made it way less spammy with Quality Score, Gross was absolutely the godfather of it all.
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Bill Gross’s heroism laid the foundation, but the challenges in this new digital age – heavily influenced by AI – are all about how we play the game now. It’s a new frontier, and we need a different kind of hero to navigate it.
Ethical AI vs. privacy: We’re in a constant battle to use AI for incredible personalisation without creeping people out or violating their privacy. It’s a tightrope walk to ensure our algorithms are transparent and fair, and that we can still deliver amazing performance without crossing any lines.
The ‘Misinformation Mess’: With AI-generated content and deepfakes becoming a thing, brand safety and consumer trust are on a knife’s edge. We need heroes to build the digital equivalent of a lie detector – tools that verify authenticity and combat misinformation, so our advertising efforts don’t get lost in the noise.
Human-AI synergy: The biggest challenge is making sure AI works with us, not for us. We need to be the heroes who champion the human element, using AI to handle the tedious stuff while we focus on the real magic: strategy, creativity, and the genuine connections that AI simply can’t replicate. It’s about orchestrating a powerful partnership, not just handing over the keys.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
My biggest digital achievement? Leading my team through the wild, continuous ride of adapting our performance marketing to the AI age. It’s less a finish line, more an ongoing challenge and a constant negotiation.
This means we’re constantly:
Cultivating AI literacy: No “one-and-done” training here! It’s workshops, tool exploration, and demystifying AI so my team stays “AI-fluent” – always ready to prompt, interpret, and leverage these evolving tools for predictive analytics, segmentation, and even content creation.
Pioneering real-time predictive AI: We’re always piloting and scaling AI applications to boost our KPIs. A huge win? Using AI for real-time purchase propensity prediction. Our bespoke model, powered by our internal ‘Thunderstruck Project’ (using Phoebe and Google’s Vertex AI), crunches customer journey data to predict who’s most likely to buy. This real-time insight then feeds directly into our bid management, letting us aggressively target those high-value customers without the need for cookies. It’s an iterative game, as AI moves fast!
Championing a “Human-Plus-AI” mindset: Far from complete, but my job here is to ensure my team thinks with AI from day one, not just as an afterthought. We’re in a constant negotiation with the technology, using it for precision targeting and personalisation. The heroism? It’s in leading this continuous dance, ensuring my team doesn’t just use AI, but actively evolves with it, pushing our performance marketing boundaries and keeping us ahead in this wild digital world.
