Twenty years of buying media across 56 countries leaves one lesson that survives everything: the platforms are instruments, and the money is made in how you play them. Paid social across Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X. Paid search on Google and Bing. Programmatic, connected TV, and geofencing where the physics of the audience justify them. The channel list is table stakes. The operator is the product.
The number that follows me around is 342 to 1: seventy-five thousand dollars of paid social spend that produced twenty-five point seven million in eBay revenue across eleven markets. I trust that figure because we proved it the hard way, with randomized holdout testing, not a dashboard's word for it. That habit has not changed in fifteen years. Campaigns here are built to a business number, defended with incrementality math, and killed without ceremony when the number stops clearing. Impressions are a cost. Outcomes are the product.
What senior buying actually looks like: account structures that let algorithms learn instead of thrash, creative volume treated as the real targeting lever it has become, negative keywords and exclusions maintained like the budget defense they are, bids that answer to margin rather than to platform-suggested targets, and pacing that respects how unevenly months actually end. I was among the first ten Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer agencies in the world, which mostly means I have watched every era of these auctions and kept the habits that survived all of them.
The person you meet is the person on the account. No handoff to a coordinator after the pitch, no quarterly deck hiding a junior media plan. When spend is meaningful and the answer matters, you want the operator who has already made these mistakes on someone else's larger budget. That is the offer, and the first audit usually pays for the conversation.
Put a senior buyer on it
The first account audit typically finds the fee before the first invoice does.
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