Budgets can be stressful, and knowing that isn’t your biggest problem…also stressful. The goal here is to keep the money you spend within that budget and keep tabs on what you are putting your money towards.

You’ve built something real; here’s how you keep it

So, what is the biggest problem in your media strategy, if it isn’t your budget?

It’s the money you’re wasting without realizing it.

According to Zach Rosen, SVP of Business Development and Partnerships at Multilocal, programmatic advertising has an estimated $20 billion waste problem. Ad dollars are spent without clear visibility into who saw the ad, where it appeared, or whether it drove any meaningful action.

In his conversation with Tessa Burg on Leader Generation, Zach shared several lessons that marketers should be paying attention to.

First: stop optimizing for cheap CPMs.

For years, marketers have been rewarded for buying impressions at the lowest possible cost. The problem? Cheap impressions don’t automatically create leads, customers, conversions, or revenue. Focusing on volume instead of value is one of the reasons media waste continues to grow.

Second: measure outcomes instead of activity.

The marketers seeing the strongest results are shifting their focus from impressions to outcomes. That means measuring acquisitions, conversions, completed actions, and business impact. When success is tied to outcomes, media decisions become easier to justify and improve.

Third: use AI to make smarter media decisions.

Zach discussed a growing approach called sell-side decisioning, which uses AI to move decisions closer to the actual impression instead of buying broad inventory and hoping the right audience is somewhere inside it. For Multilocal clients, that shift has produced 37% lower audience acquisition costs and 40–60% performance improvements. That’s not a theory. Those are results coming from campaigns already in the market.

Fourth: the audiences you’re ignoring may be your biggest opportunity.

One of the most surprising insights shared in the episode came from Procter & Gamble. Half of the company’s brand growth over the past three years came from audiences they had previously excluded. Not from larger budgets. Not from better creative. Simply from expanding who they were willing to reach. That’s a powerful reminder that targeting assumptions can become growth limitations.

Fifth: AI prompts can create blind spots.

Bias doesn’t just show up in audience targeting. It shows up in prompts too. If marketers build assumptions into their AI instructions, the outputs often reinforce those assumptions. The audiences, ideas, and opportunities you discover are only as broad as the questions you’re willing to ask.

Sixth: build systems for what’s next.

One comment from Zach stood out: the pace of AI change today is the slowest it will ever be. The question isn’t whether marketing will continue changing. The question is whether your workflows, measurement systems, media strategies, and team processes are built for where the industry is going, or where it has already been.

The future of media buying isn’t about buying more impressions. It’s about reducing waste, improving outcomes, challenging assumptions, and building systems that can adapt as fast as technology evolves.

If you want to hear Zach go into more depth about this topic, listen to the podcast here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-8gnk6-1ac2af1