• Image of Tom Hespos, Principal Consultant

    Tom Hespos, Principal Consultant

    Tom Hespos has spent more than 25 years on the side of the table where media money actually gets spent: planning it, buying it, defending it to finance, and answering for the results. He is now bringing that perspective to the biggest shift the business has seen since programmatic - advertising bought and sold by AI agents.

    Tom is an AdCP-certified practitioner and a participant in its working groups, where he lends buying-side perspective and knowledge of buying and measurement protocols to the people driving the spec. That puts him in an unusual position. He is fluent in the protocols, but his judgment comes from how brands actually make decisions. For marketers exploring agentic media, he designs pilots built to answer one question honestly: does this make our media better or more cost-effective? That question gets answered before the investment is accelerated.

    That discipline comes from healthcare, where every dollar has to survive regulatory review and a skeptical CFO. Tom founded Underscore Marketing in 2002 and grew it into a healthcare-focused independent agency with more than $12 million in annual fees, more than 100 people, and more than $800 million in annual media investment across the full channel mix. Clients included Pfizer, Novartis Oncology, Gilead Sciences, Novo Nordisk, and Daiichi Sankyo, among them eight-figure DTC television programs.

    Having built and run an agency himself, Tom also knows what independent shops are up against: pitches and clients that need senior media horsepower the payroll can't carry. Through Abydos Media, he works alongside agency teams, under their banner or his own, to deliver the strategy, plans, and recommendations that win business and keep it.

    Tom has written about digital media since 1998, with bylines in iMediaConnection, ClickZ, and MediaPost. He is based on Long Island.

What’s in a name?

Abydos is an ancient city in Egypt, the history of which spans the entire length of ancient Egyptian civilization.  The first Pharaohs are buried there, due to their desire to be buried as close as possible to the Temple of Osiris, the ruins of which still exist in Abydos today.

Abydos is a remarkably important archeological site, and important discoveries are still being made there today.  Some of these discoveries have completely upended our understanding of ancient Egypt and its early history.  For instance, in 1991, archeologists discovered a fleet of 14 royal wooden boats dating back to Egypt’s First Dynasty, revealing details of important rituals and the boats’ role in ferrying the early Pharaohs to the afterlife.

The city is so ancient that 10 temples were built successively to Osiris on the same site over the course of the first 26 Egyptian dynasties.  It is also the site of what may be the earliest brewery in the world, dating back to approximately 3100 BCE.

What makes Abydos so critical to understanding ancient Egyptian culture is the fact that its history spans the entire history of ancient Egypt, yet important new revelations come from its excavation even today.  In short, Abydos allows us to take a look at 5,000 years of civilization and see what it did right and where it steered itself off course.

Similarly, Tom Hespos has not only seen, but been an active participant in the entire history of the modern paid media business.  He arrived just in time to help the old guard of print, radio and television begin to adapt to this newcomer to the paid media landscape – digital media.

That experience led Tom to not only lead the paid media departments of several respected agencies, but to also run his own for 18 years.

This gives Abydos Media rare experience and perspective with respect to where the evolution of paid media leaped forward and when it took steps back, and why.  To understand the pitfalls and potential traps along the way to developing your paid media capability, you need to have that overarching perspective – that deep understanding of the systems and norms that govern paid media and dictate whether or not your organization can effectively and profitably address modern paid media challenges.

Together, let’s use the sum total of paid media’s unique and rich history to make new discoveries today.