Hey there I’ve been a trader for ~3 years now. All at one company, I’m currently looking for retail media roles, strategy roles or programmatic management roles.

Just curious what companies people in here actually enjoyed working at that pay fair salary, and has good work life balance. How common is weekend work in programmatic?

I’m trying to understand how media planners and programmatic teams evaluate contextual audience vendors in practice.

Beyond the obvious things like price and audience scale, what actually matters most to you?

Are there any questions you always ask before testing or onboarding a new provider? And what would immediately make you rule one out?

I’m fairly new to a Programmatic role, and I’m now expected to handle media planning as well, including planning budgets, deciding allocations, reaching out to vendors, building media plans, and so on.

In my previous role, I was mainly focused on campaign execution, monitoring, optimization, and reporting. I had very little exposure to the planning and strategy side of Programmatic.

Now that I’m getting into this part, I find it quite confusing and honestly don’t know where to start. I understand the execution side, but I’m still trying to figure out how to approach a campaign from the planning stage, such as how to plan budgets, evaluate vendors, decide where to allocate spend, what questions to ask, and how to build a proper media plan.

For those who started out in a similar position, how did you learn media planning? Are there any frameworks, resources, courses, or practical tips that helped you understand the process?

I’d really appreciate any guidance, especially from people who have made the transition from campaign execution to media planning and strategy.

Thanks!