Stop Blaming Your DSP—Do the Hard Work Instead

It’s easy to blame the DSP when your programmatic campaigns aren’t delivering. Brands and agencies alike are often quick to jump from platform to platform, convinced that the grass will be greener elsewhere. But here’s the truth: no DSP will magically fix a flawed strategy or compensate for lacklustre campaign management.

The reality is that many programmatic campaigns fail not because of the technology but because of a lack of rigorous planning, meaningful optimisation, and audience refinement. Simply put: spraying and praying doesn’t work.

Misplaced Blame and Unrealistic Expectations

Too often, agencies and brands enter the programmatic space with unrealistic expectations. For example, expecting instant results for fleet insurance campaigns—when the sales cycle spans 5–10 years—is not just wishful thinking, it’s fundamentally flawed.

Programmatic can be a powerful tool, but only when treated as part of a long-term, data-driven strategy. The heavy lifting comes in testing, refining, and learning from the data, not in hopping between platforms searching for a silver bullet.

Effort In = Results Out

Your campaigns will only perform as well as the effort you put into analysis and optimisation. This means:

• Testing and cross-referencing converters with common interests and behaviours.

• Letting the data define your audience, not your assumptions. It’s easy to get emotionally attached to who you think your target audience is. But successful campaigns come from identifying who is actually converting and doubling down on them.

• Making meaningful optimisations based on statistically significant data, not impulsively tweaking campaigns just for the sake of it.

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Lazy Launches Lead to Lazy Results

A seasoned programmatic expert once proclaimed:

“We tell the client that we launch a few audiences and pause what doesn’t work.''

This approach—launching with a scattergun audience strategy and simply pausing what flops—isn’t optimisation, it’s guesswork. True programmatic success comes from meticulous audience refinement, creative iteration, and data-backed decisions.

The Bottom Line: Do the Work

Programmatic isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it channel. It demands continuous effort, strategic thinking, and patience. The DSP is simply a tool—the results depend on how you wield it.

So, before you blame the platform, ask yourself:

• Are you genuinely testing and learning?

• Are you identifying patterns and refining accordingly?

• Are you giving your campaigns the time and data they need to mature?

  
  

If not, switching platforms won’t save you—but doing the hard work will.