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On craft
Many ways to reach a customer.
One practitioner's view, drawn from twenty years of buying media. Disagree freely. The loudest opinions are usually learning the most.
Plurality is the point.
Working frameworks, plain-English glossaries and channel deep-dives for the people who plan and buy this stuff. Written by someone who buys media for a living.
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital ad inventory through real-time auctions, using software platforms and audience data to match brands with audiences across websites, apps, video, audio, TV and out-of-home media.
/ This is the version you can put in a board paper.
It's online ads, with five middlemen between you and the impression, each charging rent. Computers buy from computers in 200 milliseconds while you nurse a flat white. Welcome to the future. It's mostly fine.
/ This is the version you can use over a beer.
You open a website. Somewhere on it, there's a slot waiting for an ad to fill it.
Multiple brands bid in real time, based on who you are and what their software thinks you're worth.
By the time you've blinked, all of this has happened. You scroll past it.
One practitioner's view, drawn from twenty years of buying media. Disagree freely. The loudest opinions are usually learning the most.
We use it daily and the leverage is real. But the accountability sits with the human in the room. Try blaming your LLM to the CFO when a campaign goes south.
The basics, properly. What programmatic is, who the players are, and the glossary that everyone pretends to know.
Display, video, CTV, audio, DOOH, native, retail media. What each is good for, what it costs, where the catch is.
DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, DMPs, CDPs. The plumbing of programmatic, with the alphabet soup translated.
How to build a media plan that holds up. Audience, budget, channel mix, frequency, useful frameworks for the questions that actually matter.
Attribution, incrementality, MMM, brand lift. What each tells you, what it doesn't, how to read the numbers honestly.
Industry analysis, market trends, vendor rumour, opinion pieces. The bits you cannot get from a textbook.
What happens between a page opening and an ad appearing, every party that gets paid, and where the margin disappears.
Google TV, Samsung Ads, LG, Fetch and the BVOD platforms. What's actually buyable. Where the real opportunity sits.
One page. Five questions. Saves you four hours of pitch decks and surfaces the misalignment in five minutes. Steal it.
Alfie Lagos is MD of Lexlab, an independent Melbourne media agency, and founder of Neuravo, an AI media planning platform.