I’ve had a version of this conversation more times than I can count. The client wants to talk about “up the funnel” and “driving product knowledge”. There is an agreement to test the program but what they really mean is display banners. The campaign is launched, the displayed banners are given wherever the displayed banners are displayed these days (which seem to be everywhere but also nowhere) and the health research of the brand shows that there is no change in the awareness of the brand. The client also didn’t “feel” the impact, so they see the system as a channel out of order.
Programmatic is not a conversation. Your plan.
For whatever reason, programmatic is still very much associated with display ads, treated and talked about as if they were the same.
I’d like to drop the word “programmatic” altogether, honestly, because it often causes more confusion than it solves. People hear it and think: low quality display banners, cheap inventory, bottom of the funnel. Therefore, when we have conversations with big sellers – especially product marketers – a misconception takes over and “the plan is off the table.”
Here’s what programmatic really is: it’s a way of doing it. In 2026, that’s how most agencies buy CTV, live sports, broadcast video, digital out-of-home, audio, high-impact display, publisher direct placement, and even podcasts. Most of the media placements that are important to drive brand awareness can be bought programmatically. Whether you buy that placement programmatically or directly depends a lot on how you do it. It doesn’t matter if your program is of any quality or designed to drive meaningful results.
So when the campaign comes back down and the room starts asking about the program, I always want to ask: what were you actually buying? Who did you mean? What did your composition look like? How would you judge success? Because those are the things that make a brand. It is not the way it is done.
Start with the really important questions
The question that should be driving the plan is: where are your future customers spending their time, and do you have the smarts to stand out when you reach them? That’s all. Everything else follows from there.
Starting with the audience and the place of purchase means that you make real decisions: which formats command real attention, which places put you closer to the content people really care about, and which combinations create growing familiarity over time. Once you have answered those questions, you can decide whether or not to buy that placement. But I can tell you, you probably should. Not for the reasons you might think, but for three simple reasons that are less exciting than placement opportunities: ease of reconciliation, frequency control, and reporting. If your campaign includes CTV, audio, and out-of-home, buying with one DSP means that your inputs and outputs stay in one place, finance teams aren’t reconciling invoices and payments to twenty-five different vendors, and you can really see what’s working. More importantly, you can control how many times someone comes across your product across the board, because someone coming across your product the right number of times in the right order is very different from seeing a CTV ad eleven times in a row and nothing else.
Rate the right thing
The same concept applies to measurement, and this is where brand campaigns quietly fail.
Most brands still evaluate brand media based on vanity metrics, not designed to capture how brand familiarity accumulates over time or how brand awareness changes over the course of a campaign. The natural feeling is to reach completion rates, impressions, CPMs: metrics that tell you that the campaign ran but not that it worked. The job of mass media is to change the way people think about you over time, so that when they are on the market, you are already part of their way of thinking. Judging it based on ad delivery is a completely wrong framework.
Proxies are actually important unique access again brand health movement. Reach tells you if you’re really growing the pool of people who have experienced the brand. Product life, measured by a tracker or survey, tells you if that interaction changes anything. But the most important question sits beneath both: if your awareness points go, does your income eventually follow? That trend, tracked over months instead of weeks, is when you find out if you have an awareness problem or an intellectual problem. They may look the same on the dashboard but require completely different responses, not just in the media mix. Saliency is a creative and messaging problem like programming, and combining the two leads to programs that don’t solve either.
One thing I’ve told clients often goes wrong: in my experience, a standard display alone has never removed a product’s health research. Not once. I understand why it tends to happen—there’s unlimited scale, the ads are incredibly easy to produce, and they’re surprisingly cheap compared to other placements. But it should be at the center of educating their clients and holding both parties on what will drive efficiency. In my experience, the formats that change perception are the ones that people genuinely pay attention to: video, audio, out-of-home. I would treat that as a planning constraint, not a hypothesis to be tested.
The audience question holds across all verticals
People ask me how a brand-building strategy should differ between sales and B2B, and my honest answer is: less than you might think. The editing logic is the same regardless of vertical orientation. Find people who don’t know you yet, reach them in places where they care, and keep it long enough to build.
The exception is the rhythm. B2B is honestly the most interesting problem for me, because it’s so difficult. Long sales cycles, multiple decision makers, a buying committee that needs to build familiarity with your brand over time. You can’t hit too hard and stop. You have to draw it out, test different methods, and allow iteration to be integrated across the committee. Sales are fast-paced and reward sharp artistic diversity and responsiveness to cultural trends. That’s a real tactical difference, but it comes from understanding the audience, not from having a different theory of each specific thing.
In both cases, the campaigns I’ve seen burn through budgets without much exposure have made the same mistake. The program was built on what was easy to buy and report on, not where the audience was or what would change their opinion.
Stop asking what programmatic can do for your product. Start asking what your future customers are watching, listening to, and paying attention to. Then build a plan around that. How you buy it is the last decision, not the first.
