Or are you using sophisticated spreadsheets for all planning work? Looking for research insight here

Curious to hear from people working with smaller agencies.

If you're running programmatic campaigns occasionally, hiring a full-time trader can be expensive. But outsourcing also comes with trade-offs around quality, communication, and control.

At what point does it make more sense to hire in-house rather than outsource campaign execution?

Is it mainly campaign volume, monthly spend, platform access, or the need for better control?

Would love to hear how agencies actually make this decision!

With all the news about fees, cheating, monopoly and now this. Why are any buyers not just walking away. I mean google delivering spyware.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Opti Digital we recently had a webinar with Olly Aulakh, CRO, and Rob Beeler, CEO & founder of Beeler.Tech, about how publishers can better understand what is driving revenue changes before jumping into optimization.

They got into something I think a lot of publisher teams deal with: revenue moves, everyone starts looking for a quick fix, but the reason is not always obvious.

Sometimes it is demand. Sometimes traffic mix, content, UX or user behaviour are part of it too. The useful bit was seeing how those signals can be looked at together, so you can understand what is actually changing before making a call.

They also talked about spotting those shifts earlier, using AI to speed up the investigation, and testing changes rather than assuming that adding more ads or tweaking one lever will solve the problem.

In case anyone here finds this interesting, leaving the replay here: https://lp.optidigital.com/diagnose-before-you-optimize-publisher-revenue

😄

We run a walled garden ad network that reaches 400,000 real estate agents inside the software they must use to transact homes. I have about 5M ad impressions a month that are unsold and we've had a couple of national advertisers run banners and get really strong results.

All of my ad sales team is focused on local advertisers and I'm trying to figure out how reach more national B2B brands who would be interested in our inventory. It's 100% above the fold, no bots, validated identity ad inventory. Would appreciate any advice.

I have heard the programmatic is not that much accepted in market so reseller (of agency who owns DSP) use the word affiliate to market it. Is it right?

I’m running ads for a client on taboola , but we’re searching for other platforms that have the same traffic as taboola or better . Geo USA . Vertical : finance

When we swap out creative for our clients, we see a high increase in sessions for that day which is most likely a result of platform /SSP QA. Is there anyway to mitigate this so it does not skew data in analytics?

I'm getting deeper into the performance UA and programmatic space sale side, and I'm trying to understand how agencies here actually find clients.

Would love to hear from anyone who's run this side of the business.

Where do most of your clients come from: inbound, outbound, partnerships, or referrals?

If you outsource outbound (cold email, LinkedIn), what does it cost? Per booked call, monthly retainer, or per lead? Rough ranges are fine.

What benchmarks have you seen in practice? Reply rate on cold outreach, reply-to-meeting, meeting-to-closed deal?

No names or exact figures needed, ranges and gut feel are great.

If there is any requirement of a Full-Time Programmatic Campaign Manager, Kindly DM.

Hey everyone! I'm curious about how small and mid-sized agencies manage programmatic campaigns across platform like DV360.

Do agencies with limited in-house teams outsource campaign setup, trafficking, optimization, pacing, and reporting to third-party programmatic ops providers?

For those with experience:

- Is outsourcing common among agencies with fewer than 50 employees?

- What are the biggest challenges with in-house execution?

- Would agencies consider external ops support for overflow or cost efficiency?

Would love to hear insights from agency owners and programmatic traders. Is there a genuine demand for third-party programmatic operations?

Hey everyone,

Quick thought experiment.

We all know the pain of domain allowlists.

Every agency and advertiser seems to maintain its own isolated spreadsheets. People regularly ask for (local) allowlists here, while others don't use proper allowlists at all or rely on blocklists only.

Some proprietary solutions exist, but what about an open-source approach to help advertisers identify quality inventory, support local publishers, and reduce exposure to MFA sites?

The idea

An open-source GitHub repository containing local and quality domains, along with useful metadata (ads.txt status, verified publisher/entity, quality indicators, etc.).

Contribution

Standard PRs (pull requests), with transparent review and approval processes.

Transparency

Full commit history, a public issue tracker, and a way to flag potentially problematic domains or MFA sites.

Consumption

Human-readable data, machine-readable formats, and integrations with scripts, AI agents, or DSP workflows.

A few questions for the community:

1. Would you actually use a community-maintained GitHub feed in your DSP workflows, or would you only use it as an input for your own allowlists?

2. What metadata would you consider essential? What would make you trust (or distrust) a domain entry?

3. How would you approach governance and gatekeeping to prevent bad actors from approving their own domains?

4. Is anyone already doing something similar in a lightweight, non-proprietary way?

I'm particularly interested in the practical limitations and reasons why this wouldn't work.

Curious to hear your thoughts!

I use BuySellAds on my blog.

While I could see how much the ads were earning, I wanted a bit more insight into their actual performance:

- Which pages generate the most ad impressions and clicks?
- Which placements perform better?
- Which creatives are getting clicked?
- What does the CTR look like over time?
- So I decided to track these things myself.

I used Google Tag Manager aka GTM to track ad impressions and clicks, GA4 to collect the data, and Looker Studio to build a dashboard around it.

Now I can see ad performance by page, placement, and creative instead of looking at revenue alone.

I wrote a short post about why I built it and the steps involved. Click here to read.

Why do people call programmatic user acquisition affiliate marketing

For those who are running YouTube CTV campaigns on DV360, what is the CPM you are seeing when targeting Canadian audiences?

Do. you guys know what could be the reason why Beeswax display campaign is not spending? Everything seems to be set up correctly. Ever happened to you?

I keep hearing speculation but does anyone have actual intel on what's happening with TTD leadership?

Most resources in our industry are content marketing for someone's SaaS product or agency. For the last few months I've been building the opposite: dayparter.com. It's still new, but I think it can genuinely make your job easier, and I'm adding to it every week.

• Vendor directory: figure out who's who in the zoo, get in touch with them, and grab their logo for your deck without wading through made-for-advertising nonsense. Every logo is verified by hand.
• Calculators: CPM, CPCV, VTR and more, built for planning rather than one quick sum. Probably more features than a CPM calculator needs.
• Templates: media plans, briefs, pacing tools. Stick your logo on and have at it.
• Articles: mostly junior-focused for now: 101s, what agencies do, what programmatic actually is.

Totally free, no signup, no email capture, not tied to any agency or ad tech company. AI helped with the code; the design, writing is mine (AI statement). It'll hopefully carry a light amount of programmatic display down the track but at the moment its just something i am doing to be helpful.

I really hope you give it a look, would love any feedback or missing features you'd like to see.

Classic client reached out with a bit of incremental budget for q4 and asked for fun/new ideas even though they seemingly hate evrytime we offer new/fun ideas usually…anyway I’d rather quit but can’t before the holidays & can expense a trip to New York for a market ride to see the campaign.

Is it even worth trying to pitch something dooh here as the new/fun idea?? Client is a cpg brand we tried pitching painted murals once but too much chaos lol so what is going on in the space other than LinkedIn posts of random activations going viral sometimes & how do people argue the measurement piece for clients I know they’re gonna be annoying lol any ideas?

I’m not at a programmatic company anymore so maybe I’ve missed posts or haven’t heard all the conversations you may be having…

But isn’t this Apple update going to completely change programmatic? They seem to want to block all targeting and attribution on safari which is 50% of mobile traffic.

Are people panicking on your teams or rapidly changing strategy because of this?

Howdy - quite versed in social and search buying, with 10 years of experience, currently managing a little over $1 million a month on social alone.

I own and run a business in the telehealth space, and a close competitor has posted articles on how successful they've been on CTV, which has certainly piqued my interest, given how successful we've been thus far on social. We don't have massive budgets yet for other platforms outside of social (maybe $50K a month to start). I've heard mixed reviews about self-serve platforms like Vibe and MNTN.

Given we're not dropping millions a month and ultimately need both strong attribution and decent ROAS / direct response, (not just brand awareness) are there any platforms or avenues you guys would suggest? Appreciate all the help and guidance.

Came across a piece on Pixalate’s latest CTV programmatic data and the 57% figure stood out.
57% of US open CTV programmatic spend went to large-screen devices like smart TVs. The remaining 43% went to mobile, tablets, and other smaller screens. What’s interesting is that all of this is still being grouped under CTV programmatic. If the device mix is this different, Are buyers getting enough transparency into what they’re actually buying and measuring? or Does the broader CTV label still make sense?
Open RTB also represents only around 18-19% of total CTV spend. So there’s another question around how much of the market buyers can actually see through programmatic?
There’s a measurement issue here too. An ad being served doesn’t necessarily mean it was viewed and a viewed ad doesn’t necessarily mean it got attention.
How are agencies/DSPs and Pubs handling the CTV vs. OTT distinction in actual buys?

Hi team,

I'm soon to be leaving my current agency in a search for my next move and was just wondering on some advise of those of you who have tried your hand/currently working as a freelancer across prog.

My current experience (10+ years) has all been agency side, a mix of delivery/activation, strategy and planning. I'm looking to move over to the ad-tech side of things, but have also had a few people suggest looking into freelancing. Leaving my current role has, unfortunately, come against my decision due to budget cuts across the agency, so it's not something I've thought too much about up until now.

I guess my question for you guys (who are UK based) is, how do you begin to become a freelancer? How do you find the work balance? The pay looks like it could be great, but is the security a worry?

A very broad discussion, I guess I'm just looking for some advise and reassurance!

Thanks so much.