Media Buying in Advertising: Where Budget Goes to Die or Grow

Media buying in advertising is the process of purchasing ad placements across channels, formats, and audiences to reach the right people at the right time for the right cost. Done well, it is one of the highest-leverage activities in marketing. Done poorly, it is one of the most efficient ways to spend money without growing a business.

Most of what gets called media buying today is actually media optimisation within a pre-agreed channel mix. The harder, more commercially important question, which channels to be in at all and why, often gets less attention than it deserves.

What Media Buying Actually Involves

At its core, media buying covers three things: where you place your advertising, how much you pay for it, and the terms under which it runs. That sounds simple. In practice it spans programmatic display, paid search, social media, connected TV, audio, out-of-home, print, and broadcast. Each has its own pricing mechanics, audience data quality, measurement conventions, and optimisation levers.

Traditional media buying, the kind that involves negotiating directly with publishers and broadcasters, still exists and still matters for certain categories. But the majority of digital media is now bought programmatically, through automated systems that bid in real time for impressions based on audience data, context, and bid price. This shift has made media more targetable and more measurable, but it has also introduced a layer of complexity that many marketing teams do not fully understand and that many agencies do not fully explain.

I spent years running agencies that managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across more than thirty industries. The single most consistent pattern I saw was this: clients who understood what they were buying made better decisions than clients who trusted the plan without interrogating it. That is not a criticism of agencies. It is an argument for commercial literacy on the client side.

The Difference Between Buying Media and Building Reach

There is a version of media buying that is essentially demand harvesting. You set up paid search campaigns, retargeting audiences, and shopping ads. You optimise toward conversions. The numbers look good. Cost per acquisition is within target. Return on ad spend is healthy. Everyone is satisfied.

The problem is that a significant portion of those conversions were going to happen anyway. The person who searched for your brand name, clicked your paid search ad, and converted was not created by that ad. They already knew you. The attribution model credited the click. The business credited the channel. But the growth did not come from the media buy. It came from whatever built the brand awareness and intent upstream.

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance for exactly this reason. The numbers were clean, the story was easy to tell, and the ROI looked compelling. It took years of watching businesses plateau, despite strong performance metrics, to properly recalibrate. The channels that look most efficient are often the ones doing the least to create new demand. They are collecting what other activity generated.

Think about it like a clothes shop. Someone who walks in and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who simply passes by. But the job of media is not just to serve the people already standing in the fitting room. It is to bring more people through the door who have never been inside. That requires reach, not just retargeting.

If you are thinking about how media buying fits within a broader commercial growth model, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic layer that media planning should be anchored to.

How Media Planning and Media Buying Relate

Media planning is the upstream decision about which channels to use, which audiences to reach, and what role each channel plays in the purchase experience. Media buying is the execution of that plan. The two are often handled by the same team or agency, but they require different thinking.

Planning asks: where are our prospective customers, what are they doing when they are most receptive, and what format will land the message most effectively? Buying asks: how do we secure those placements at the right price, with the right targeting parameters, and with the right measurement in place to evaluate performance?

When planning is weak, buying becomes an exercise in optimising a flawed brief. You can have the most efficient programmatic setup in the world and still be reaching the wrong people with the wrong message in the wrong context. The technology does not fix a strategic problem. It just executes it faster.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation in go-to-market strategy makes a related point: the organisations that grow consistently are those that align their commercial investment with where growth actually comes from, not just where it is easiest to measure.

Programmatic Buying: What It Is and What It Is Not

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital ad inventory in real time. When a user loads a webpage, an auction runs in milliseconds. Advertisers bid for the impression based on who the user is, what they have done before, and how much that impression is worth to them. The highest bid wins the placement.

This system has made media more efficient in some ways. Targeting is more granular. Waste can be reduced. Frequency can be capped. Audiences can be segmented by behaviour, intent, and context. But programmatic also introduced new problems that the industry has been slow to address honestly.

Brand safety is one. Ads appearing next to content that damages the brand is a real risk in open exchange buying. Viewability is another. An ad that loads below the fold and is never seen by a human still registers as an impression. Ad fraud, where bot traffic generates fake clicks and inflates performance data, is a persistent issue that is difficult to eliminate entirely.

None of this means programmatic is not worth using. It absolutely is. But it means that buying programmatically without understanding what you are buying, and without the right verification and measurement tools in place, is not the same as buying effectively.

When I was scaling iProspect from a team of around twenty to over a hundred people, a significant part of that growth came from helping clients understand what their programmatic spend was actually doing versus what the dashboards said it was doing. That gap, between reported performance and real business impact, is where a lot of media budget quietly disappears.

Direct Buys, Private Marketplaces, and Open Exchange

Not all programmatic inventory is equal. The open exchange is the broadest and cheapest pool, but it carries the highest risk of low-quality placements. Private marketplaces (PMPs) are invite-only auctions between publishers and selected buyers, offering better inventory quality with more transparency. Programmatic guaranteed is closer to a traditional direct buy, where a fixed volume of impressions is reserved at a fixed price through automated systems.

Direct buys, negotiated directly with publishers outside of programmatic systems, still make sense for certain placements. A homepage takeover on a premium publisher, a sponsorship of a specific content vertical, or a branded content integration cannot be bought through a DSP. These require relationship-based negotiation and tend to deliver stronger context alignment than open exchange inventory.

The right mix depends on what you are trying to achieve. If brand safety and context are critical, lean toward direct and PMP. If scale and efficiency are the priority, open exchange with strong verification is a reasonable approach. Most sophisticated media plans use a combination of all three, with budget allocation shifting based on campaign objective, audience, and channel.

Audience Targeting: The Mechanics and the Limits

Modern media buying offers targeting capabilities that would have seemed extraordinary twenty years ago. You can target by demographic, geography, device, browser, time of day, purchase intent signals, content consumption patterns, CRM match, lookalike modelling, and dozens of other parameters. The question is not whether targeting is possible. It is whether the targeting you are applying is actually improving outcomes.

Over-targeting is a real and underappreciated problem. When you narrow an audience too aggressively, three things happen. Reach drops to a level that cannot sustain meaningful brand building. Frequency rises because the same people are seeing your ads repeatedly. And costs increase because you are competing for a smaller pool of inventory.

There is also a structural issue with targeting only people who already look like your customers. If your lookalike model is built on your existing customer base, it will find more people who resemble your existing customers. That is useful for conversion campaigns. It is not a mechanism for growth. Growth requires reaching people who do not yet know you, not just people who look like people who already do.

This tension between precision and reach is one of the more important strategic decisions in media planning. Getting it wrong in either direction has real consequences. Too broad and you waste budget on irrelevant audiences. Too narrow and you optimise yourself into a ceiling.

Measurement, Attribution, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Attribution is one of the most contested topics in media buying, and for good reason. The question of which touchpoint gets credit for a conversion is not a technical problem with a clean solution. It is a modelling choice with real budget implications.

Last-click attribution, still the default in many analytics setups, gives all the credit to the final touchpoint before conversion. This systematically overvalues lower-funnel channels and undervalues the awareness and consideration activity that created the intent in the first place. It is not wrong as a data point. It is wrong as a complete picture.

Multi-touch attribution models distribute credit across the experience. Data-driven attribution uses machine learning to weight touchpoints based on their observed contribution to conversion. Marketing mix modelling takes a broader econometric view, accounting for media, seasonality, price, distribution, and competitor activity. Each has strengths and limitations.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which recognise marketing effectiveness, and the entries that stand out are not the ones with the most sophisticated attribution models. They are the ones where the team understood what they were trying to change in the market, built a plan to change it, and had the intellectual honesty to evaluate whether it worked. Attribution is a tool for that evaluation. It is not a substitute for it.

The honest position is that media measurement gives you a perspective on reality, not reality itself. Decisions made on the basis of that perspective should be proportionate to confidence in the data quality. False precision, reporting cost-per-acquisition to two decimal places when the attribution model is unreliable, is worse than honest approximation.

Tools like behavioural analytics platforms can add qualitative depth to quantitative media data, helping teams understand not just what happened but why users behaved as they did after encountering an ad.

What a Strong Media Brief Looks Like

Most media briefs are too thin. They specify budget, timing, and target audience at a surface level, then leave the channel and format decisions to the agency or buying team. This is not inherently wrong, but it creates a situation where the buying decisions are made by the people with the least context about the business problem being solved.

A strong media brief answers several questions that often go unasked. What specific behaviour are we trying to change, and in whom? What does success look like at the business level, not just the campaign level? What do we know about how this audience consumes media, and what does that imply about channel selection? What is the role of this campaign in the broader marketing calendar? Are we trying to build awareness, shift consideration, or drive immediate conversion, and how should the channel mix reflect that?

When I was handed the whiteboard pen in a Guinness brainstorm during my first week at a new agency, the instinct was to fill the space with ideas. The better instinct, which took longer to develop, was to start with the question the brand actually needed to answer. Media planning works the same way. The channel conversation should come after the strategic conversation, not instead of it.

For teams thinking about how media buying connects to broader commercial growth priorities, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks that sit upstream of channel and budget decisions.

The Role of Creative in Media Effectiveness

Media buying and creative are often treated as separate disciplines with separate owners. In practice, they are inseparable. A well-bought placement with weak creative will underperform. A strong creative in the wrong context, wrong format, or wrong channel will also underperform. The two need to be planned together.

Format matters more than most media plans acknowledge. A thirty-second video designed for television does not automatically work as a pre-roll ad. A static display banner does not carry the same emotional weight as a native content placement. Connected TV creative needs to work without sound in some contexts. Social video needs to hook in the first two seconds or it is skipped.

The best media plans specify not just where the ad will run but what format is required and why, and they are built in conversation with the creative team. When media and creative planning happen in silos, you get campaigns where the budget is well-placed but the message does not land, or where the creative is strong but the targeting means it reaches people who have no reason to care.

Vidyard’s research on video’s role in revenue generation for go-to-market teams highlights how format alignment with audience and channel context directly affects pipeline outcomes, a principle that applies across media formats beyond video.

Agency Relationships and What to Actually Expect

Most large advertisers buy media through agencies. The relationship works well when there is genuine alignment on objectives, transparent reporting, and honest conversation about what is working. It works poorly when the agency is optimising toward metrics that serve the relationship rather than the business.

Having run agencies, I am not going to pretend this dynamic does not exist. Agencies have commercial pressures. Certain channels and formats carry better margins. Programmatic buying has layers of fees that are not always fully disclosed. The incentive to recommend what is easy to buy is not always the same as the incentive to recommend what is right for the client.

The clients who got the most from agency relationships, in my experience, were the ones who stayed commercially engaged. They understood the economics of media buying well enough to ask the right questions. They did not micromanage the execution, but they did hold the agency accountable to business outcomes rather than campaign metrics. That distinction matters enormously.

BCG’s analysis of the relationship between brand strategy and commercial transformation makes a point worth noting: the organisations that grow consistently are those where marketing and commercial leadership speak the same language, and where media investment is evaluated against growth outcomes, not just channel performance.

Creator-led media is also changing the agency model in interesting ways. Later’s work on go-to-market strategies with creators points to a shift where distribution and creative are increasingly bundled, and where the traditional media buying model is being bypassed in favour of direct audience access through creator partnerships.

Where Media Buying Fits in a Growth Architecture

Media buying is not a growth strategy. It is a mechanism for executing one. The businesses that treat it as a strategy, pouring budget into channels without a clear model for how that spend creates demand and converts it, tend to find that efficiency improves over time while growth stalls.

The businesses that grow through media do so because they have a clear view of the market they are trying to reach, a message that is relevant to that market, and a channel strategy that puts that message in front of people who have not yet engaged with the brand, as well as those who have. They measure honestly, adjust based on what the data actually tells them, and resist the temptation to over-optimise toward the metrics that are easiest to attribute.

Growth hacking frameworks, covered well by resources like Crazy Egg’s growth hacking overview, sometimes treat media as one lever among many in a broader acquisition and retention model. That framing is useful because it positions media spend in relation to product, pricing, distribution, and retention, rather than treating it as a standalone activity with its own internal logic.

The tools available for planning and managing media have expanded significantly. Semrush’s overview of growth tools covers some of the planning and research capabilities that sit alongside media buying platforms, particularly useful for understanding search demand and competitive positioning before committing budget.

Media buying, at its best, is the commercial expression of a clear growth strategy. It is how you put your message in front of the people who need to hear it, in the context where they are most likely to receive it, at a cost that makes the economics of growth work. Getting that right requires more than platform knowledge. It requires a clear-eyed view of what you are trying to change in the market, and the discipline to evaluate whether the spend is changing it.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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