Paid Media

Paid media is the work of buying attention on purpose — search, social, programmatic, OTT, audio, print, out-of-home — and measuring what that attention does. It’s the discipline where every assumption gets tested against data within days, where strategy meets the auction, and where the gap between sophisticated thinking and lazy execution shows up fast and unambiguously. This page is where we collect STIR’s thinking on paid media: how we define it, how we approach it, the questions clients ask us most often, and the work we’ve done that proves the case.

What we believe about paid media

Strategy that can’t be executed doesn’t matter. Advertising, content and messaging that isn’t integrated is noise. We do the work that proves it and delivers measurable outcomes.

Paid media is where the strategy becomes accountable. Every campaign comes back with a verdict — by the next morning, sometimes by the next hour. The auction doesn’t care how clever the creative is or how aligned the stakeholders were. It cares whether the work moves the metric. That clarity is paid media’s gift and its curse.

Most paid media work fails for one of two reasons. Either it’s been disconnected from the brand strategy and creative that should be guiding it — campaigns optimized against KPIs no one tied back to a business outcome — or it’s been treated as a button-pushing exercise where the agency or the in-house team is judged on whether the dashboard is green, not on whether the business is growing. Both produce the same result: spend that performs against its own metrics and underperforms against the business’s.

We believe paid media has to do real work, and the work has to ladder to the business. That means agreeing — before money goes into market — what success looks like in terms a CFO would recognize, not just terms a platform would reward. Cost per acquisition matters because it relates to lifetime value, not because it’s a number a dashboard happens to produce. Click-through rate matters when it leads to qualified action, not because the platform is congratulating you for it. The platforms optimize for the metrics that make them money. Our job is to optimize for the metrics that make our clients money, which is a different job.

It’s also the reason we don’t separate paid media from the strategy, creative, and digital work that surrounds it. The shops that do — pure-play performance agencies, in particular — produce work that’s frequently efficient and almost never strategic. Lowest cost per click, wrong audience. Optimized funnel, off-brand creative. Cheapest acquisition, customers who churn in three months. The campaign wins on its own terms and loses on the business’s. We’d rather run media that’s slightly less impressive in the auction and substantially more useful to the business.

How we approach paid media

Every paid media engagement at STIR moves through four phases. The phases run continuously rather than sequentially — paid media isn’t a project, it’s an ongoing system that improves with operation.

1. Plan

Planning is where the campaign either succeeds or fails — long before any media is bought. We start with the business outcome the spend is supposed to influence, work backward to the audience, the message, the channels, and the budget allocation. The deliverable is a media plan that connects directly to what the business needs, not just to what the platforms want to sell us.

2. Activate

Activation is the build and launch — campaign structure, creative trafficking, audience setup, tracking, the operational machinery that turns a plan into live spend. The work here is unglamorous and intensely consequential: a well-planned campaign with a botched activation underperforms in ways that look like a strategy problem but are actually a setup problem. We don’t outsource this work, and we don’t rush it.

3. Optimize

Once the campaign is in market, the work becomes daily — bid management, audience refinement, creative rotation, budget reallocation across what’s working and what isn’t. The discipline is to optimize against the right metrics (the ones that ladder to business outcomes) rather than the easy ones (the ones the platform surfaces by default). Optimization is where most of paid media’s value is created or destroyed.

4. Report and learn

Reporting closes the loop. Not just “here’s what we spent” but “here’s what we learned, here’s what to do differently, and here’s how this affects the next planning cycle.” Paid media engagements that don’t feed back into strategy don’t improve; they just get more expensive over time as platforms compete for the same finite attention.

Common questions about paid media

What channels should we be running on?

It depends on the business, the audience, and the outcome — and we’d be skeptical of any agency that gave you a definitive answer before knowing all three. As a general matter, the right channel mix is the one where your audience actually pays attention, the platform’s targeting genuinely works for your use case, and the unit economics make sense. Often that’s a combination of search, paid social, and one or two emerging channels (OTT, audio, retail media) depending on the category. Channels that look obvious in pitch decks aren’t always the ones that perform.

How much should we be spending on paid media?

The honest answer is that it depends on what you’re trying to achieve, not on a percentage-of-revenue benchmark. A scrappy startup looking to test demand might spend a few thousand a month. A national brand competing in a saturated category might need six or seven figures per month to be visible at all. The right starting point is the business outcome you’re trying to drive, the cost it typically takes to drive that outcome in your category, and the minimum viable budget to learn something useful. We’re happy to model this with clients before any spend commits.

Can we just run paid media without doing the strategy work first?

Yes, but with caveats. If your positioning is clear, your audience is well-defined, and your creative is ready, paid media can absolutely run in isolation. If those things are unclear, the paid spend will surface the lack of clarity quickly — and expensively. Often the most useful first conversation is whether the strategic foundation exists or whether we need to firm it up before turning the budget on.

How long does it take to see results from paid media?

Depends on the channel and the goal. Direct-response search campaigns can produce measurable results within days. Upper-funnel brand campaigns and channels with longer learning periods (programmatic, OTT) typically need 4 to 8 weeks of activity before the data is reliable. The mistake we see most often is killing campaigns before they’ve produced enough data to learn from, which guarantees you’ll keep starting over without ever optimizing into something that works.

How do you measure paid media performance?

Against the business outcome agreed before the campaign ran. For lead-gen campaigns, that’s qualified leads, pipeline contribution, and ultimately revenue influenced. For e-commerce, it’s ROAS and lifetime-value-adjusted ROAS. For brand campaigns, it’s awareness lift, consideration shift, and search-volume increases. We help clients agree on a small number of specific metrics that genuinely connect to the business, then measure against those — rather than reporting on whatever the platform happens to surface.

What’s changing about paid media in 2026?

Three things worth knowing. First, AI-driven bidding and audience targeting is now the default across the major platforms — which raises the value of strategic input (creative, audiences, business context) and lowers the value of granular manual optimization. Second, traditional search volume is declining as AI Overviews and chat-based search take share, which is reshaping how search media has to be planned. Third, attribution is getting messier — third-party cookies are gone, walled gardens are tighter, and modelling matters more than ever. The fundamentals haven’t changed, but the methods have.

Do you handle programmatic in-house or outsource it?

In-house, with senior team involvement throughout. We don’t outsource paid media activation to third-party trading desks where the team running the campaigns has no context on the brand or the strategy. The whole point of integrated work is that the people optimizing the campaigns are in the same conversations as the people setting the strategy. Outsourcing breaks that loop in exactly the way the through-line argues against.

Recent thinking on paid media

The latest STIR perspectives on media planning, performance, attribution, and the work of buying attention well.

Paid media in practice

Three engagements where strategic clarity and integrated execution produced commercial outcomes. Full case studies live on /work/.

Who you’ll work with

Paid media at STIR is led by Maureen Breiner, working with the strategy, creative, and analytics teams from planning through reporting.