PROGRAMMATIC
AGENCY IN TORONTO.

Most programmatic is bought badly — one platform, default settings, no visibility into where the money went. We buy across thirteen DSPs and show you every placement, because the difference between those two approaches is most of your budget.

One DSP Is a Constraint, Not a Strategy

A demand-side platform can only sell you the inventory it has access to, at the price it sets. Agencies standardising on a single DSP do so for their own operational convenience, and the cost of that convenience lands on the client as inventory they could not reach and prices they did not need to pay.

We operate across thirteen DSPs. That means pursuing the same audience through whichever platform is efficient at that moment, accessing publisher private marketplace deals that are platform-specific, and moving budget as pricing shifts. In a market as competitive as Toronto, that flexibility is worth a substantial share of media budget.

Where Programmatic Budget Actually Goes

Two problems consume most wasted programmatic spend, and both are invisible in standard reporting. The first is made-for-advertising inventory — sites built solely to carry ads, which deliver impressions and no attention. The second is uncontrolled frequency across platforms, where the same user is served the same creative dozens of times.

We curate inventory actively through inclusion lists rather than relying on exclusion lists and platform defaults, which are considerably weaker than advertisers assume. Frequency is capped across the entire buy, not per platform. And we report at placement level, so you can see exactly where impressions landed. The first month of this is often uncomfortable reading about the previous agency.

What We Run

Channels Planned Together, Not Sold Separately

Display, video, connected TV, digital audio, digital out-of-home and native are frequently sold as separate products by separate teams, which guarantees they are planned in isolation and measured against each other rather than as a system.

Bought together, they compound. A household reached on connected TV, then on audio during the commute, then on a digital screen near your location, then retargeted on display, is a coherent sequence rather than four disconnected impressions. Unified frequency control across all of it is what makes the sequence deliberate rather than accidental.

Transparency as a Default

Programmatic's reputation problem stems largely from opacity — arbitrage, undisclosed markups and reporting that stops at the aggregate. Clients often cannot establish what proportion of their spend reached media at all.

Our reporting shows placement-level delivery, and clients see spend, delivery and conversion across every channel in one live dashboard rather than a monthly narrative.

That transparency extends to our own pricing. We do not charge a retainer. Programmatic is priced on a CPM basis, so the fee tracks the media actually bought rather than sitting flat regardless of activity. There is no minimum spend and no lock-in — the average engagement runs about twelve months, but clients can work month to month. Creative is a separately quoted add-on rather than a bundled promise. A page arguing for transparency that would not be specific about its own fees would not be worth reading.

Toronto Market Conditions

Toronto is Canada's most contested media market. National brands, US advertisers targeting Canada and a dense local advertiser base all bid against each other, and CPMs reflect it. Efficient buying matters more here than in any other Canadian market.

Where we start is an audit of what your current buying actually delivers. The industry-level picture is stark: the ANA's Q1 2026 benchmark found only 43.3% of programmatic spend reaches a fraud-free, viewable, measurable impression, and the gap between the best and worst advertisers came almost entirely from media quality rather than fees. We measure your account against that published figure and show you the result before recommending any change.

How We Work — Fees, Minimums and Commitment

There is no minimum spend. Most agencies publish a floor because small accounts are unprofitable to service. We would rather assess whether paid media can work for your situation and tell you honestly if it cannot, than turn away a business that is a good fit but not yet a large one.

There is no minimum contract. The average engagement runs about twelve months, but that is a pattern we have observed rather than a term we impose. Clients can work month to month and leave whenever they choose. An agency that needs a lock-in to keep your business has already told you something.

We do not charge retainers. Programmatic is priced on a CPM basis, so what you pay tracks the media we actually buy for you rather than a flat fee that stays the same whether we are busy or not.

Creative is available, and it is priced separately. We can produce assets, but it is scoped and quoted to what the account genuinely needs rather than bundled into a headline number. If you already have creative that works, you should not be paying us to remake it.

All campaign work, reporting and communication is delivered in English.

The Benchmarks We Plan Against

We would rather show you the numbers we plan against than ask you to trust ours. We publish our benchmark research openly, and it is the same data we use when building a media plan.

• Blended cost per lead across industries sits near $214 in 2026, with legal running roughly four times what e-commerce pays — see our cost per lead by industry benchmarks.
• Average return on ad spend is around 2.9:1 and has fallen about 10% year over year — the detail is in our average ROAS by industry report.
• Connected TV CPMs span $15 to $85 depending on industry and inventory quality, which we break down in our 2026 CTV CPM benchmarks.
• Display, video and audio rates are covered in our programmatic cost guide.

If a plan we put in front of you assumes performance meaningfully better than these figures, we will say why — and if we cannot justify it, the plan changes.

Frequently Asked Questions