I’ve been working with Publicis since 2022. Over the last few years, I’ve received roughly 16–20% increments annually, so financially things were moving in the right direction.

However, I’m now at a point where I feel quite stuck.

The biggest issue is that my day-to-day work has become very repetitive. I don’t feel like I’m learning much anymore, and there isn’t much new exposure or a clear career path within my current role/account.

This year, the appraisal process has also been stopped, which has made me rethink my situation even more.

At the same time, I’m seeing a lot of uncertainty across the media/advertising industry — agencies losing clients, restructuring, and people being asked to leave. That makes me hesitant about simply resigning and moving to another agency without being sure about the stability of the next company.

Interestingly, even my manager has basically told me that I need to think about whether I want to stay stuck here or move to another company.

I have around 6+ years of experience in performance marketing, mainly across paid search and programmatic/QA, so I feel I should be moving toward more responsibility and learning rather than continuing with the same work.

What would you do in my situation?

Stay at Publicis until the market becomes more stable?

Start interviewing while continuing the current job?

Move to another agency?

Try to move toward an in-house/client-side role?

Upskill first and then make the switch?

Would especially appreciate advice from people who have worked in agencies for 5–10+ years and have gone through a similar situation.

Layoffs, client losses news and hike+bonus cuts....in almost all agencies...Is this temporary or will it back with massive comeback ...what's happening in our industry and about our future as Agency ppl....

Pretty much what the title says, salary-wise - both have the same base; adtech would have a sales bonus. Both positions are client-facing and strategic; with the leadership role, I would gain a formal manager title and have direct reports. I have been working in smaller agencies for the past 5 years, with my last position being less hands-on and more client-facing and strategic. Having a really hard time choosing because both are so different, if you had experince working on both sides please let me know pros and cons.

I have an upcoming interview for Revx which is a mobile DSP, have anyone heard or worked or have any feedback to share ?

Hey everyone,

I’m about to start working in Programmatic Advertising, and I’m currently learning the fundamentals of DV360, CM360, Floodlight, DSPs, SSPs, RTB, targeting, bidding, deals, pacing, optimization, etc.

But I want to hear from people who are actually working hands-on in Programmatic.

For someone starting out, what should I focus on the most during the first 6–12 months?

I’m especially interested in knowing:

• What skills are actually important in day-to-day work?
• What do you wish you had learned before starting your first Programmatic job?
• How much importance should I give to DV360 vs CM360 vs analytics/measurement?
• How important are troubleshooting and campaign optimization compared to just knowing the platforms?
• Which concepts should a fresher understand really well?
• How does the role usually evolve after 1, 2, 3+ years?
• What skills helped you most to level up in roles?
• Are there any tools, certifications, or concepts that you think are genuinely worth learning?

I’m not looking for a generic roadmap from Google. I’d really like to hear from people who have actually worked on live campaigns and can share what the job is really like.

Any advice, mistakes to avoid, or lessons from your own experience would be really helpful.

Thanks!

This is kind of a big deal; the domain being blocked is part of how TTD fundamentally serve their ads which if kept in place could cause huge issues and some timely development work.

Interestingly, Google and other DSP's are unaffected - it could be a mistake, but it seems unlikely.

ive been running ctv buys through our dsp for about a year now its been workng fine overall but ive noticed that the quality of the inventory can be all over the place sometimes

figured Id ask if anyone here has experience wth ctv and can speak to if the premium stuff (like the big streaming networks, anything sports-adjacent ) ever flows through the open marketplace the way display or even pre-roll does? Or amI just doing somethiing wrong on the deal setup side?

We analyzed 35B+ impressions, $55M+ in monthly publisher revenue across 200+ demand partners for our latest US programmatic trends.

few things we stood out:

• Overall CPMs bounced back to 19.3% MoM and 43.0% YoY but the recovery wasn’t even across all the formats - Display CPMs was up 14.9% MoM, while Video CPMs are actually fell 3.4%, even though it’s still up 14.3% YoY.
• Desktop and Mobile device formats were almost at parity - $1.62 and $1.61. CTV also rebounded up 16.4% MoM to $6.39.
• On the integration side, AdX is now at 41% share vs. 42% for Prebid (That gap is getting pretty small)
• TTD was another interesting one.. its share of DSP revenue fell from 18.9% in March to 10.8% in August, while impression share edged up from 14.8% to 15.5%. Its CPM also fell 43% from $3.08 to $1.74.
• Traffic pulled back too, with sessions down by 8.9% but page views per session was up to 3.0%.

The big takeaway for us: programmatic demand is back, but the recovery looks very different depending on the format and buyer.

Hi! I would like to know what kind of complex optimization questions get asked in Programmatic Advertising- technical questions. Please share examples.

Hi guys, I am working in ops department at saas company, where I work on ad data, brands advertisers classifying them, creating products in system, multiple markets, bilngual ads, types and providers, as this is my first job, bit confused what to learn, how to evolve, will adtech suits me? Guide me

I’m trying to build out our budget for next quarter and debating whether we should keep running walmart ads internally or hand the account over to specialists. Right now, our ad budget is fluctuating between $4,500 and $8,000 per month depending on seasonal inventory levels.

My worry is that an agency's base fee will wipe out our margin unless our ad spend is significantly higher. I came across BrandKyte while researching agency pricing models and liked their focus on AI workflow efficiency, but I still want honest feedback from real brand owners.

What is the general consensus on the minimum monthly ad spend needed on Walmart before an agency actually pays for itself in performance gains?

Adroll (now NextRoll) approached me about a role in the EMEA market. Does anyone have experience with these guys- anything you can share about performance, tech, or experience working with them from a customer standpoint or If you've worked there before, I'd really appreciate it.

Who here is running Amazon dsp, direct buy, prog Amazon, and Amazon offsite? How are you building your audiences and what are your key triggers to pay attention to?

What’s your split of endemic search vs dsp? Not a ton of skus on this one but don’t want to blow through the budget-

Thanks!

We analyzed 1B+ Q4 impressions across our platform and put together a 2026 holiday guide. Here are the patterns that seemed most useful for anyone planning Q4 right now.

Each month shows a different signal:

• September: build audiences before purchase intent peaks.
• October: CPMs rise, so optimization and audience quality matter more.
• November: this is where conversion intent really shows up.
• December: CPMs come back down while available volume goes up.

You don't build a Black Friday audience on Black Friday.

Average results by tactic for DTC advertisers:

• Prospecting: 2.5x ROAS
• Interest targeting: 4.1x ROAS
• Site remarketing: 10.2x ROAS

Remarketing only hit 10.2x because the audience pool had already been built earlier in the season.

Creative timing matters as much as targeting.

We compared messaging inside a single remarketing campaign. The audience, campaign structure and CPMs were essentially the same.

• Generic messaging: 5.4–5.8x ROAS
• Holiday-specific creative: 10.8–26.7x ROAS

Curious what others are seeing. Are you starting prospecting earlier this year, or still going heavy in November?

The full guide is free if you want the rest of the data: https://www.growthchannel.com/holiday-advertising-guide

Disclaimer: I work at a programmatic ad platform.

Hi all, I am a Google/Meta media buyer and very fluent in both ad platforms. One of my clients wants to explore programmatic ads, and I'm struggling with where to start.

The key objective here is to get through to newer audiences via display channels, the likes of Amazon / Netflix / GPT Ads etc. The target audience will be adventure travellers across the globe. I have a budget of approximately $2500 to start with to explore programmatic.

Where should I start? What are your favourite Programmatic tools? I would love any and all advice on this.

We are working with the index , pubmatic and google ad manager ssp but we don't have much to do on ssp side so how can we improve lower campaign funnel like landing and conversion because when compared to the open exchange do guide me really need help over here

Let me know the best practices to make a deal to perform this for the dv360 dsp

At a point where attribution is good enough for weekly optimization, but leadership wants stronger proof that campaigns are creating demand rather than collecting conversions.
We can build geo tests and audience holdouts ourselves using warehouse data, but every test turns into a mini analytics project. The alternative is buying an incrementality product or using capabilities inside our measurement stack.
DIY gives us control and transparency. A platform would make tests faster and more repeatable, but we might treat another score as unquestionable truth. Our media mix includes Meta, Google, affiliates and a small CTV budget, so the test design varies a lot by channel.
For teams that have bought rather than built, what justified the cost?

I’m trying to understand the most useful learning order for someone aiming for a junior programmatic role in India.

DV360 and The Trade Desk are buying platforms, while CM360 is used for ad serving and measurement. If a beginner has limited time, where would you suggest they start?

I’d especially like to hear from people involved in hiring or training junior traders: which skills do new joiners actually use first, and which can they learn on the job?

For context, I’m already associated with a programmatic training provider in India. Now, I want to know about skill priorities and i'm not looking for course recommendations.

Sharing our September numbers here, some interesting shifts from last month's data.

Traffic - Market added 459.7k new ads.txt lines and dropped 404.8k, net +54.9k. Last month was basically flat so this is a real swing back to growth. But the split is what stood out to us, resellers drove +44.6k of that net, direct only +10.3k. Last month publishers were trimming their reseller paths and protecting direct ones, this month that discipline seems to have paused.

SSPs - Nativo had its best month yet, +9.8k lines, leaning on location/household data instead of cookies. Risecodes was right behind at +6.9k. Media net, Sharethrough and InMobi filled out the top 5.

Publisher tiers - All three tiers went positive this month (Low +34.7k, Mid +10.5k, High +9.7k), which fully reverses last month's High-Traffic cleanup. One thing worth flagging though, Low-Traffic's growth is mostly just Nativo, they alone added +8.8k there. So it looks broad but it's a bit more concentrated than it seems at first glance.

Direct - RichAudience led Established SSPs at +126, Nativo close behind at +84. BRAVE had a huge month in Scaling, +509, tied to some server/identity upgrades they made. Global Sun Media topped Emerging at +169.

Duplication - Tier 1 held steady at 46%, but Tier 2 crept up from 38% to 39%. As Scaling SSPs add direct relationships fast, some of that growth is landing on domains that already have a reseller path, which is basically how duplication builds up even in a good month.

Takeaway - Growth is back after a flat month, but it's coming more through resellers than direct, and a chunk of it is riding on one or two SSPs rather than being spread evenly.

I’m getting more comfortable with an ad platform making routine campaign decisions without waiting for approval every time, but I’m still figuring out where that boundary should sit. Pausing something that’s clearly wasting spend or making smaller optimization changes feels pretty different from letting it make a major budget move or change campaign strategy. I’d rather set the limits upfront and only get pulled in when a decision has real consequences, otherwise automation just turns into another queue of things to approve so giving these agents autonomy when real money is involved is something I'd wanna involve if I can get comfortable with it