Media practice
Where an advertisement appears is a decision. Most of the time nobody makes it.
We buy placement and make the creative that goes in it. The part we do differently is the part in between: knowing where the impressions actually landed, and being willing to stop buying the ones that do nothing.
How the practice works
Five pages on method. Read the placement one if you only read one — it is where most budget quietly goes.
Services
The practice
Four services defined by what they produce, and the one thing we are asked for most often and always decline.
Method
How work is measured
Three numbers we report, three we refuse to report as outcomes, and why our case studies are less impressive than everyone else's.
Method
The creative process
Structured so that results can be attributed to something. The order matters more than the taste, and the first step is the one usually skipped.
Method
Brand safety and placement quality
Two problems usually treated as one. The reputational risk is the smaller of them — the larger is spend on inventory where nobody could have seen anything.
Practical
Working with us
What an engagement looks like, what we need from you, and the three conditions under which we would rather not start.
The problem we keep finding
Programmatic buying delivers impressions across thousands of properties, most of which the buyer never sees and cannot name. The report shows the impressions were served. It does not show where, next to what, or whether a person had any opportunity to see them.
When we pull a placement report on an inherited account, a substantial share of spend is typically sitting on properties nobody would have chosen deliberately: auto-refreshing pages, content farms, apps bought for volume, and inventory below the fold that never entered a viewport.
What we do about it
- Read the placement report, at the property level, every week — and act on it. Exclusion lists that are never updated are decoration.
- Buy on viewable impressions where the platform allows it, and measure viewability where it does not.
- Treat brand safety as a buying decision, not a report generated after the quarter.
- Reconcile outcomes to the client's ledger, not to the platform's self-reported conversions.
What we will not do: guarantee a result, buy inventory we cannot see the placement report for, or present a case study without its baseline. Each of those is available elsewhere and each is why media budgets get spent without anyone able to say what happened.