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Discipline

Digital advertising

Paid media online: display, programmatic, online video, connected TV and retail media.

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Digital advertising buys paid space online: display, programmatic, online video, connected TV and retail media. It can reach a defined audience at almost any budget, change course quickly and connect advertising to sales, which makes it the place where many plans pick up and convert the interest other disciplines create. Its results look precise, so the real question is always what it added that would not have happened anyway.

Start with the 101Digital advertising 101: the whole pictureHistory, how it works, where it is used, what it costs, the rules, its limits and when to choose it, with every claim sourced.Read the 101

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What matters when choosing

  • Reach on the sites, apps, streaming services and retailers' platforms your audience really uses.
  • Consented data or strong contexts to target with, as tracking signals thin out.
  • A transparent supply chain: checks on authorised sellers, independent verification and how much of the budget reaches publishers.
  • Incrementality tests rather than clicks and last-touch attribution alone.
  • Governance for the many small daily decisions on budgets, bids and creative.

Questions to ask vendors and agencies

  1. What share of our budget reaches publishers, and what does each link in the chain take?
  2. How do you verify that our ads were viewable, shown in safe contexts and sold by authorised sellers?
  3. How will we test what these campaigns added beyond the sales we would have had anyway?

Common mistakes

  • Crediting ads with sales that would have happened anyway, because clicks and last-touch reports say so.
  • Buying in the open auction without checking who is really selling the inventory.
  • Treating a viewable impression as proof of attention.

What it is good at

  • Choosing the audience, the context and the moment for each impression.
  • Fast, detailed reporting, with budgets and creative that can change daily.
  • Entry at any budget, across most of the world's advertising inventory.

What to watch for

  • Fees along a long, partly opaque supply chain that shrink the budget reaching publishers.
  • Targeting and measurement that depend on consent and on identifiers that are thinning.
  • Precise-looking metrics that are easy to over-credit.

How it is bought and priced

Bought through platforms and auctions: per thousand impressions for display, video and connected TV, per click or per action where the platform takes the performance risk, or as fixed-price direct deals for premium inventory. Technology, data and agency fees sit along the chain and are worth asking for in writing.

Typical disciplines Digital advertising Search (SEO and paid search) Social media Advertising (TV, radio, print, cinema) Affiliate and partner marketing

Platforms that fit (13)

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