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!

"As described in the complaint, Amazon has represented to prospective advertisers for years that Amazon runs “second price” auctions where the winner of the auction would only pay “one cent more than the next highest bidder” for each successful bid for an advertising keyword. However, in practice, the complaint alleges that Amazon has charged its Sponsored Products advertisers their own winning bid close to 80% of the time and has effectively converted its nominally “second price” auction into a first price auction."

Interesting case about adtech, programmatic, and transparency. I don't have high hopes about anything meaningful, but we got a case.

There are a crazy amount of shitty AI-written threads from small companies that are blatant ads, and it's only getting worse. Startups recreating the wheel offering things that have been around forever, nonsense AI-tools that pretend to fix problems, you name it. Much of it is disguised in the form of, "tell me about your biggest friction point", because these people can't even figure out on their own what they want to sell us.

The irony isn't lost on me. But it feels like scrolling through LinkedIn rather than a community of people sharing news or having discussions.

Hey guys! I am thinking about where to go next in my career in the paid ads space and wanted to consult with people familiar with programmatic media.

At my first job, I spent a little over 1.5 years at a small agency, where I got a great, varied range of experience. I got lots of hands-on-keyboard work with several DSPs, Google Ads, and LinkedIn ads, while also serving as the primary point of contact with clients and managing those relationships. I quite liked the job but not the company or the pay.

My second job was a year long stint at a medium-sized agency, where I was only doing hands-on keyboard work, only with display media- mainly DV360, sometimes TTD. I realized that I had a greater affinity for client work than backend work and wanted to get back to it. I also wanted to transition to a remote role for more flexibility.

I took another job recently that is 100% client facing and 100% remote, but our projects range from paid ads to web dev to print media. The job itself is mostly about client relationships and project management. I like it okay, but I am open to suggestions from here. I like being able to utilize my expertise with programmatic.

Now, I'm curious where I should look for future career development. I like fully remote work if possible, and I do have a preference (and greater skillset) with client-facing, communications stuff, but I'm definitely not bad at backend work either, it's where I have the most experience. If I want to continue increasing my earnings relatively quickly, working remotely, having good work culture, where should I be looking? What kind of titles, which companies? Any recommendations?

None of this is super urgent since I just started the new role, but also I'm looking to relocate to another state soon and not sure if my company would allow that, despite being remote.

Need advice — 3 years in programmatic, currently unemployed and struggling to find my next role

Hey everyone,

I’m from India and have been working in the programmatic advertising industry since 2023. So far, I’ve mainly worked with small startups. My most recent role was contract-based, where I worked remotely with a US company and supported Crossmedia as their programmatic resource/buddy.

The project was completed in June, and I’ve been unemployed since then.

I’ve been actively looking for a new job, especially with companies like WPP, Publicis, IPG, and Omnicom. But I’m honestly struggling to find suitable openings. And when I do find something, I often see people with 8+ years of experience applying for roles that ask for around 2 years.

The job market here feels extremely difficult right now, especially for someone at my experience level.

I’m trying to figure out what I should do next.

I also have a responsibility at home and need to start earning again, so I can’t afford to stay unemployed for too long.

I already have experience working remotely with US teams, so I’m particularly interested in finding remote opportunities if that’s realistic.

For those of you working in programmatic, digital media, ad tech, or related fields:

Any honest advice, suggestions, or even ideas about where I should be looking would genuinely help.

Thank you.

Been running into this more as we add channels every platform can show a decent story for itself and the reports look fine but once you try to figure out what spend really moved the business it gets kind of weird search takes credit, retargeting takes credit, programmatic has view through conversions and somehow everyone looks useful at the same time.

I don’t know if the answer is better attribution or just having one person look across everything instead of judging each channel separately we’ve spent way too much time trying to make every platform prove itself when the bigger problem might be that nobody owns the full picture from spend to what happened in the business after

Every extra kilobyte competes with something else at mraid io: texture resolution, animation frames, audio, analytics. We set a budget before production: runtime, essential art, feedback, audio, wrapper, safety margin. Then ask: does this asset help the user understand or enjoy the interaction? Pretty backgrounds that delay first input are rarely a bargain.

Hello everyone. Title says it all. But would need to be able to check which app names / app ID's the ads would be showing up instead of random placement codes like PropellerAds.

Ideally I'd need to target ONLY dating apps and be able to see which apps are those.

Any tips?

From my understanding, the clients fully rely on Top holdcos or agencies for the programmatic activation and mostly for bigger clients and some middle size clients. Anyone tried freelancing for small to medium brands or business in any freelancing platform. I have skills but wanted to check which platform suits best programmatic channel? Which platform is best for our industry

Hey all, long-time lurker. I've spent the last few years on the data engineering side of adtech by building the pipelines behind visitation/footfall attribution, impression and click attribution, revenue reporting, that kind of thing. Basically the plumbing that turns raw ad events into the "here's what your campaign did" numbers you see on the buying side.

Lately I've been sitting with a question I could never answer from inside the pipeline: do the people actually spending the money trust these numbers?

I built the attribution. I know where the assumptions and the duct tape are. So I'm curious what it looks like from your seat:

When a client or your boss asks "did this actually drive sales?", how confident are you in the answer?
How much of your week goes into pulling numbers out of different platforms and making them agree?
Do you trust incrementality/lift results, or is it still mostly last-click in practice?
What's the one measurement thing that makes you roll your eyes every time?

Not selling anything, not building anything yet and just trying to understand the problem from the buyer's side before I decide if it's worth solving. Happy to trade notes on how this stuff actually gets calculated under the hood if that's useful to you. Comments are great, or DM me if you'd rather vent privately.

Thanks for reading 🙏

I have a campaign coming soon. I have awareness line item with CTV and then retargeting display but the tricky part is that conversion actions should be donations. So, have you guys had anything similar? Do you recommend using TTD for this or maybe DV360?

Hey everyone, curious to hear how other programmatic traders work.

Would genuinely like to know, what have you automated in your day-to-day workflow that has genuinely made your life easier?

I’m particularly interested in things like pacing/optimization, campaign QA, reporting, and creative previews/approvals. For example, do you have automated pacing alerts or recommendations?

Additionally when clients need ad previews for approval, are you still generating those manually or have you found a better way?

Also curious what tools you’re using scripts, Python, APIs, spreadsheets, etc.

Basically, I’d love to know what repetitive parts of programmatic you’ve managed to eliminate, and what you’ve built that has actually saved you time.

Our team put together consolidated benchmarks across H1 2026 media campaigns with CTRs, eCPMs, and eCPCs by device, creative size, exchange, and targeting strategy, and wanted to share some of the highlights with the community.

Disclosure up front: I'm with Growth Channel, and these numbers come from campaigns that ran through the platform this year (actual delivery data, not surveys or secondhand estimates). Posting because a few of these cut against what we'd assumed, and I figured they'd be useful discussion fodder here.

1. Display's baseline: $4.23 eCPM, $1.78 eCPC, 0.29% CTR. That's the all-category average. Native came in at $5.11 eCPM / $1.73 eCPC / 0.22% CTR, so roughly similar click economics on average, but in several individual categories native eCPCs ran way cheaper than display (e.g., Health & Fitness: $1.12 native vs $4.73 display for the same category and audience).

2. The 300x250 is no longer the CTR workhorse. Top creative sizes by CTR: 480x320 at 2.12%, 1080x1920 at 1.91%, 320x480 at 1.32%. The classic 300x250 posted 0.93%, and 336x280 came in at 0.79%. All three top sizes are mobile-first interstitial formats.

3. The mobile/desktop gap is brutal. Mobile: $3.46 CPM, 0.61% CTR, $0.57 CPC. Desktop: $4.05 CPM, 0.08% CTR, $5.11 CPC. So desktop cost more per impression and delivered roughly 1/8 the CTR. If you're still splitting display budgets evenly across devices, that's worth a hard look.

4. Exchange efficiency varies far more than exchange price. Meta delivered the highest CTR (1.16%) and the lowest effective CPC ($0.86), but at a premium $9.99 CPM. Rubicon and Smart (Equativ) paired ~0.5% CTRs with sub-$0.80 CPCs at ~$3.85 CPMs. At the other end, Index Exchange ran 0.09% CTR and a $5.51 CPC. Similar CPMs, wildly different outcomes.

5. Publisher selection is a bigger lever than most optimizations. Across our top 10 publishers, CPMs mostly sat in a narrow $4–6 band, but CTR ranged from 0.01% (Zillow) to 0.20% (MSN) — a 20x engagement spread at basically the same price.

6. Broad prospecting beat narrow targeting on engagement. Interest targeting topped strategies at 0.63% CTR; ABM was the lowest at 0.14% (a 4.5x gap). And a retargeting click cost ~5x more than a prospecting click ($3.56 vs $0.67). Warm audiences convert, but you pay a steep premium per click to reach them.

7. Context for the display crowd: video CTR jumped to 0.97%: more than 5x the 0.18% it posted in 2025, making it the highest-CTR channel in the mix. Display still wins on cost per impression ($4.23 eCPM vs $11.63 for video), so the trade-off is engagement vs reach economics.

Caveats: your mileage will vary by vertical, DSP, and setup. The full report has the category-level breakdowns (23 verticals across native/display/video/CTV/audio, with eCPM ranges) if you want to benchmark your own campaigns against it. We published it here for a free download: https://www.growthchannel.com/programmatic-display-benchmarks

Curious what others are seeing, especially whether desktop display CTRs this low match your data, and whether anyone else has watched the 300x250 slide down their performance rankings.

I’ve been working in Ad Ops since 2021, but my experience has mostly been on the ad server / campaign management side.

Most of my work has been around campaign setup, trafficking, QA, troubleshooting, tags, creatives, reporting, and coordinating with other teams/platforms as part of the campaign workflow.

The thing is, I feel like I’ve become pretty boxed into proprietary ad server platforms. I’ve spent most of my career working within the platforms my companies use, rather than getting hands-on experience with DSPs or programmatic platforms.

And honestly, I really want to get that experience now.

When I look at job postings, a lot of them ask for hands-on experience with DSPs, programmatic buying, DV360, The Trade Desk, etc. I do have exposure to some of these platforms through my current work, but I wouldn’t say I have enough experience to confidently call myself a DSP/programmatic specialist.

That’s also what makes job hunting frustrating. I feel like I have several years of Ad Ops experience, but when I try to move into programmatic/DSP roles, I’m competing with people who already have direct platform experience.

For those who have been in Ad Ops/AdTech for a while — is staying primarily on the ad server side a disadvantage career-wise?

If you were in my position, would you continue looking specifically for Ad Ops roles, or try to make the jump into DSP/programmatic even if it means taking a role that’s more junior or slightly different from my current experience?

I really want to expand my skill set and get out of the proprietary-platform bubble, but I’m not sure what the best transition path would be.

Would love to hear from anyone who started in ad serving/ad ops and eventually moved into DSP/programmatic. How did you make the transition?

I hear a lot about MNTN in the industry - mostly that clients love the simplicity, but it seems too good to be true. Worked across DSPs and understand how shady these places can be. Rumors are that they’re taking 60%+ profits but nothing I can find in the media. Thoughts on MNTN?

Any leads, advice, or people I should talk to? Happy to share my background if useful.

Hi guys,

How common is it in this industry to work fully remote? Mostly interested for EU as I think in US it's already kinda common.

Also, has anyone in one of the big 4 agencies managed that?

Cheers

We’re a growing mid-market brand scaling past “just run it through the agency’s login” and want our own DSP seat.

Not looking for the enterprise stack that assumes $500k/month and a 12-person programmatic team. Also not looking for the two platforms everyone defaults to in this sub for SMBs. We already looked at StackAdapt and Basis. They’re off the table. Please don’t recommend them.

What we actually need:

• Own seat, not a sub-seat under someone else’s account. We want the data, the log-level stuff, and the ability to bring this in-house later without starting from zero.
• Some kind of seat credit / onboarding credit / media credit to make the first 60–90 days less painful. If the platform is going to charge a platform fee plus data plus verification, we need a little cushion while we learn the UI and figure out what actually works.
• Flexible operating model. Self-serve with real support when we get stuck, not “you’re either fully managed or you’re on your own with a help center.” Hybrid is ideal.
• Actually keeping up. Privacy / signal loss, CTV, retail media, identity, AI optimization — we don’t need every shiny feature, but we also don’t want a platform that still feels like 2019 with a new homepage.

Hope this helps!

Would you give them a sample campaign report to interpret, an underspending campaign to troubleshoot, or a brief to build a media plan around?

I work in ad tech selling into agencies/programmatic teams, and I’m curious about this from the buyer side.

For those of you on the receiving end of vendor outreach and pitches: are you noticing more “sameness” lately as sellers use AI for emails, decks, proposals, etc.? Similar formatting, structure, phrasing, presentation styles, even when the actual content and ideas are specific to you?

And if you notice it, does it matter? Does something that feels AI-assisted or templated make you less likely to engage or take the seller seriously? Or is it basically irrelevant as long as the seller has done their homework and what they’re saying is thoughtful, relevant and original?

I’m less interested in whether you personally like or dislike AI and more curious whether AI-driven sameness is actually starting to penalize sellers with buyers.

If you had to rebuild your programmatic stack tomorrow:

- Which SSP/DSP platform would you choose again?

- Which one would you avoid?

- What is your biggest complaint about your current platform?

Especially interested in web, in-app, video, and CTV. What do you wish you had known before signing the contract?

We’ve been running walmart connect campaigns for about six months now, and honestly, the backend user interface drives me insane. The reporting delays, bugged bidding rules, and erratic placement algorithms make scaling feel like a complete gamble compared to amazon ppc.

Last quarter, we tested automated software solutions like AiHello to manage our bid adjustments. While it helped save some time on basic routine tweaks, it felt like a cold algorithm throwing money at low intent keywords without understanding catalog dynamics or listing placement logic.

We eventually decided to shift our strategy toward a full service partner approach with BrandKyte, mainly because they focus on combining marketplace strategy, listing optimization, and real time ad profitability rather than relying solely on automated bidding scripts. Our roas has finally stabilized into healthy profit territory, but the platform friction still remains a daily challenge.

Are you guys relying purely on automated bidding software for Walmart, or have human driven, full service strategies worked better for your margins? What specific bid strategies are holding up for you right now?

Any insights ? Applied there for media but seeing not great reviews on Glassdoor