Social Media Marketing

Digital advertising tech refers to the agencies, software, and platforms used to plan, buy, target, and measure paid advertising across channels like search, social, display, video, and programmatic media. It includes full-service agencies that run campaigns for clients as well as self-serve platforms that businesses use to manage their own ad spend.

A digital advertising agency is a team of people who plan strategy, create ads, and manage media buying on a client's behalf. A programmatic advertising platform is software, typically a demand-side platform, that automates the buying and bidding process, letting a business's own marketers manage campaigns directly without an agency in between. Some vendors offer both a platform and managed services on top of it.

Costs vary widely depending on whether you're paying for agency management fees, software subscriptions, or a hybrid of both, as well as your ad spend and the channels involved. Pricing structures differ by vendor, so check individual listings for specifics.

Consider how much in-house expertise and time your team has for campaign management, since agencies handle execution while software requires someone internally to run it. Also compare how each vendor reports results and whether their channel focus, such as paid search versus programmatic display, matches where you actually want to advertise.

Timelines depend on the scope of work, ranging from a few days to set up a simple self-serve campaign to several weeks for an agency to complete strategy, creative production, and channel setup on a larger account. Ask a prospective vendor for a realistic onboarding and launch timeline before committing.

Often on paper, but only if you already have the internal expertise to run it well - a poorly managed self-serve platform can waste more budget than an agency's management fee would have cost.