A Tale of Gouda
Table of Contents
Here is a way we told the story of media buying in 2024. Buying great ads for less is easy. Four steps.
Find where your audience actually is.
Move the budget toward what works.
Squash other people's bugs. Chase inventory across open, guaranteed, preferred and direct. Block the shady supply paths, unblock them when they change. Call the publisher. Re-traffic everything.
Then do it again next week.
Step three is where the work is. So, a short story about it.
A client wanted to expand its connected TV beyond the three finance networks, and we bought from Cheddar. Here is how it went, as a board game. Start at the bottom left.
Third-party verification finds data-center traffic in the open auction, so switch to a preferred deal. Call the publisher and buy guaranteed, from a brand-new ad ops team. Under-deliver, dramatically. Convert the deal to direct through a spreadsheet export from the ad server. Teach the new team how the supply side and demand side talk to each other. Move the deal to a DSP with better filters. Switch back to open, now without the quality problems. With clean data at last, the client can evaluate the publisher. The publisher was determined not to be a good fit for the plan.
It is this sort of painstaking work that makes an A-level media agency. Nobody sees it. The client saw a publisher evaluated on clean data and a plan that moved on.
But it isn’t 2024, and working hard only matters when you have prioritized the right goals. The first decision on any campaign is its north star: a controlled brand study for awareness or purchase intent, or cost per acquisition where an acquisition can be measured. Everything in the story above served a completion-rate objective that was itself a proxy. What the evidence says about choosing the right goals, and reaching them, is on the science of advertising.