Insights · The Field Notes

Clear thinking for modern B2B media.

Field notes on programmatic strategy, audience precision, and the operating logic of modern B2B advertising — written for marketing leaders who plan their own media.

All field notes

Strategy · 6 min read

Why B2B Programmatic Advertising Should Start With Audience Strategy

Most programmatic campaigns fail because they begin with channel mix, not the buyer. Here is the order that actually works.

When most B2B brands brief a media partner, the conversation usually starts with channels: how much display, how much video, where the CTV budget should sit. That conversation is the wrong starting point. Channels are activation, not strategy.

An audience-first approach reverses this. Before any inventory is bought, we identify the company segments, decision-makers, and buying-committee roles your campaign actually needs to influence — using firmographic, behavioral, intent, and contextual signals together.

Once that audience is defined, channel selection becomes a logical consequence. CTV makes sense for senior decision-makers who watch streaming during evenings. Native belongs alongside trade publications they trust. Display surrounds research moments. Each channel earns its place in the plan because it serves a defined audience purpose.

Brands that start with audience consistently see lower wasted impressions, cleaner attribution data, and a clearer story to tell their leadership about where the budget is working.

Channels · 5 min read

Display, Native, Video, and CTV: What Each Channel Should Actually Do

Every programmatic channel has a job. Most campaigns confuse the jobs and underuse each channel. Here is the breakdown.

Display is your always-on awareness layer. It surrounds your audience across the publications and tools they already use, keeping the brand visible at low CPM. Display is not a conversion channel — it is a presence channel.

Native is your credibility layer. Native units sit inside the editorial flow of premium publications, so they earn engagement that display cannot. Native is where you place thought leadership, research summaries, and category-defining points of view.

Video and CTV are your trust layer. A 15-second pre-roll on a streaming network or a brand spot inside a podcast lets a senior decision-maker actually see and hear your brand. CTV is especially powerful for reaching C-Suite audiences during evening hours.

Retargeting is the connective tissue. Once an account engages with any of the above, retargeting keeps the brand present across the long B2B research cycle. Used together, the four channels form a coherent surround — used in isolation, each one underperforms.

Planning · 4 min read

Why Cheap Impressions Can Be Expensive for B2B Brands

A low CPM is meaningless if the impression reaches the wrong person on the wrong page. Here is how to evaluate real cost.

Open-exchange inventory looks attractive on a CPM basis. The problem is that low CPM environments often skew toward made-for-advertising sites, low-value placements, and audiences with no relevance to a B2B buying committee.

When you pay $2 CPM to reach an audience that includes zero of your target accounts, your effective cost per relevant impression is infinite. When you pay $18 CPM to reach a curated PMP that surrounds the actual decision-makers in your category, your real cost is dramatically lower.

The right metric is not CPM. It is cost-per-relevant-impression, factored against the eventual cost-per-engaged-account and cost-per-qualified-lead. Sophisticated B2B planning starts with target inventory quality, not headline CPM.

This is also why we prefer private marketplaces and inclusion-list buying for most B2B campaigns: the supply path is shorter, the inventory is brand-safe, and the audience overlap with our targeting is significantly higher.

Retargeting · 5 min read

How Retargeting Supports Long B2B Buying Cycles

B2B buyers research for months before contact. Retargeting is what keeps your brand in the room during that silence.

The average B2B buying cycle for a considered purchase runs from three to nine months, often involving five or more stakeholders. Most of that time, no one from the buying account is talking to your sales team — but they are quietly researching.

Retargeting is how you stay present during that silent research phase. When someone from a target account visits your pricing page, downloads a case study, or attends a webinar, well-structured retargeting keeps the brand visible across the publications and apps they use over the following weeks.

Effective B2B retargeting is more than 'bombard everyone who visited the homepage.' We segment by intent depth, recency, and account value, then sequence creative to match the next logical step in the buying journey — moving from awareness creative to product specifics to social proof to direct CTA.

Done well, retargeting turns dormant interest into pipeline movement without ever feeling intrusive.

Education · 5 min read

What Makes Programmatic Advertising Different from Traditional Digital Ads

Programmatic is not just digital ads with a different interface. It is a different system entirely.

Traditional digital advertising buys placements: a banner on a specific site, a sponsorship on a specific newsletter, a social post on a specific platform. The unit of purchase is the placement.

Programmatic buys audiences. The unit of purchase is the impression delivered to a specific person matching specific criteria, regardless of which site or app that impression lands on. The technology decides where to serve in real time, evaluating thousands of micro-signals per available impression.

This shift matters for B2B. Instead of guessing which publications your CFOs read, you reach CFOs across every publication they actually visit. Instead of locking budget into one social platform, you let the buying technology follow the audience across display, native, video, CTV, audio, and mobile environments.

Programmatic also returns far richer signal back to your team — every impression generates data about who saw it, where, in what context, and what they did next. That data feeds the next planning cycle, making each subsequent campaign sharper than the last.

ABM · 6 min read

How Account-Based Media Supports Demand Generation

ABM is not just a sales motion. With programmatic, account-based media becomes a coordinated paid layer your demand-gen team can lean on.

Most ABM programs start in the sales tools — list-building in a CRM, sequenced outreach, custom landing pages. The marketing layer often shows up late, mostly through email and LinkedIn.

Account-based media changes that. By uploading a target account list into the programmatic stack, we surround named companies across display, native, video, and CTV — so when sales finally reaches out, the brand is already familiar inside the buying committee.

This is especially powerful for enterprise sales motions where six or more stakeholders influence a single decision. A single SDR cannot get in front of all of them. Account-based media can — and it can do so weeks before the formal buying process starts.

Done in coordination with demand gen, account-based media compresses the time between first touch and first meeting, lifts engagement on email outreach, and gives sales reps measurably warmer conversations.

Measurement · 5 min read

What B2B Brands Should Measure Beyond Clicks

Clicks are a poor proxy for B2B performance. Here is what to measure when the buying cycle is long and the buying group is large.

B2B campaigns rarely earn their pipeline through clicks. A senior buyer who sees your CTV spot, mentions you in a buying-committee meeting, and visits your site directly two weeks later will register as a 'direct' visit — not a programmatic conversion.

Better measurement starts with engaged-account metrics: how many of your target accounts had multiple stakeholders engage during the campaign window, how often, and on which content. This is a stronger signal than raw click volume.

Other meaningful signals include lift in branded search, increase in direct traffic from target geographies, growth in newsletter and webinar registration from target firmographics, and improvement in pipeline velocity for the segments you targeted.

We design our reporting around those signals, not vanity metrics. The goal of measurement is not to look busy — it is to answer the question every CMO actually asks: did this spend move the business?

Planning · 7 min read

How to Build a Smarter Media Plan Before Spending Budget

The most expensive part of a media plan is the part you decide before any money is spent. Here is the planning sequence we use.

Every campaign we run begins with the same five-step planning sequence, before any inventory is bought or any creative is briefed.

First, we define the audience: which company segments, which roles, which buying-committee structures matter for this objective. Second, we define the moment: what stage of the buying journey we are trying to influence — early research, vendor shortlist, or final decision.

Third, we define the channel logic: which mix of display, native, video, CTV, audio, and retargeting fits the audience and the moment. Fourth, we define the measurement frame: which signals will tell us the campaign worked, and how those map back to revenue conversations.

Fifth, we define the optimization plan: what we will adjust mid-flight, what we will hold constant, and what data we will collect to make the next campaign sharper. Only after those five are written down do we open the buying platform. The discipline of that sequence is what separates strategic media from reactive spending.

Ready to upgrade your media strategy?

Build My Media Strategy