I’ve had a version of this conversation more times than I can count. A client wants to talk about “moving up the funnel” and “driving brand awareness”. There is an agreement to test programmatic but what they really mean is display banners. Campaign is launched, display banners are served wherever it is display banners run these days (seemingly everywhere yet also nowhere) and the brand health study indicates no change to brand awareness. The client also didn’t “feel” the impact, and therefore deems programmatic as a channel doesn’t work.
Programmatic is not the conversation. Your plan is.
For whatever reason, programmatic is still overwhelmingly associated with display ads, treated and spoken about as though they are one and the same.
I would love to retire 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. And so, when we have conversations with senior marketers — particularly brand marketers — the misconception takes the reins and “programmatic is off the table.”
Here’s what programmatic actually is: it’s a method of transacting. In 2026, it’s how most agencies buy CTV, live sports, streaming video, digital out-of-home, audio, high-impact display, publisher direct placements, even podcasts. Most of the valuable media placements to drive brand awareness can be bought programmatically. Whether you buy those placements programmatically or direct is primarily based on how you’re transacting. It says nothing about whether your plan is of any quality or built in a way to drive meaningful results.
So when a campaign comes back flat and the room starts questioning programmatic, I always want to ask: what were you actually buying? Who were you targeting? What did your creative look like? How were you judging success? Because those are the things that build a brand. Not the transaction method.
Start with the questions that actually matter
The question that should be driving the plan is: where are your future customers spending time, and do you have the creative to stand out when you reach them? That’s it. Everything else follows from there.
Starting from audience and environment rather than buying method means you’re making real decisions: which formats command genuine attention, which environments put you next to content people actually care about, and which combinations build cumulative familiarity over time. Once you’ve answered those questions, you can decide whether to buy those placements programmatically or not. But I can tell you, you probably should. Not for the reasons you might think, but for three very simple reasons that are a lot less exciting than the placement opportunities: ease of reconciliation, frequency control, and reporting. When your campaign spans CTV, audio, and out-of-home, buying through a single DSP means your inputs and outputs live in one place, finance teams aren’t reconciling invoices and payments across twenty-five different vendors, and you can actually see what’s working. More importantly, you can control how often someone encounters your brand across all of it, because a person encountering your brand the right number of times in the right sequence is very different from seeing the same CTV ad eleven times in a row and nothing else.
Measure the right thing
The same logic applies to measurement, and this is where brand campaigns quietly fail.
Most brands are still evaluating brand media based on vanity metrics, which are not designed to capture how brand familiarity accumulates over time or how brand awareness changes throughout the course of a campaign. The instinct is to reach for completion rates, viewability, CPMs: metrics that tell you whether the campaign ran but not whether it worked. The job of brand media is to shift how someone thinks about you over time, so that when they’re finally in-market, you’re already part of how they’re thinking. Judging it based on ad delivery is the wrong frame entirely.
The proxies that actually matter are unique reach and brand health movement. Reach tells you whether you’re truly growing the pool of people who’ve encountered the brand. Brand health, measured through a tracker or a study, tells you whether those encounters are changing anything. But the more important question sits underneath both: when your awareness scores move, does revenue eventually follow? That trend, tracked over months rather than weeks, is where you find out whether you have an awareness problem or a saliency problem. They can look identical on a dashboard but they require completely different responses, and not just in media mix. Saliency is a creative and messaging problem as much as a planning one, and conflating the two leads to plans that don’t actually solve either.
One thing I’ve told clients that tends to land uncomfortably: in my experience, standard display alone has never moved a brand health study. Not once. I understand why it is so often the default-there is unlimited scale, the ads are incredibly easy to produce, and they’re remarkably cheap when you compare to other placements. But it should be on the agency to educate their clients and hold both parties accountable for what is actually going to drive performance. In my experience, the formats that shift perception are the ones where people are genuinely paying attention: video, audio, out-of-home. I’d treat that as a planning constraint, not a hypothesis to test.
The audience question holds across every vertical
People ask me how brand building strategy should differ between retail and B2B, and my honest answer is: less than you’d think. The planning logic is the same regardless of vertical. Find the people who don’t know you yet, reach them in environments where they’re actually paying attention, and sustain it long enough that familiarity builds.
What differs is the rhythm. B2B is honestly the more interesting problem to me, because it’s harder. Longer sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, a buying committee that needs to build collective familiarity with your brand over time. You can’t hit hard and stop. You have to draw it out, test different approaches, and let frequency compound across the whole committee. Retail moves faster and rewards sharper creative variation and responsiveness to what’s happening in culture. Those are real tactical differences, but they come from understanding the audience, not from having a separate theory for each vertical.
In both cases, the campaigns I’ve seen burn through budget without much to show for it made the same mistake. The plan was built around what was easy to buy and easy to report on, not around where the audience actually was or what would genuinely shift their perception.
Stop asking what programmatic can do for your brand. 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.
