Being Ahead of the Curve Usually Means Being Willing to Learn

by Michaela Sharp | Sep 23, 2026 | Blog, Dalilu Wire, Digital, Media Buying, Media Planning

A reflection on programmatic advertising, hands-on media buying, and the learning mindset behind staying ahead of the curve.

Lately, I feel like I have been on one of those hockey-stick learning curves.

A very Canadian analogy, I know. You know the shape I mean. For a while the line barely moves. You are learning, experimenting, getting things wrong, trying again and wondering whether you are actually getting anywhere. Then something clicks. Suddenly the line shoots upward. I have been experiencing that again recently while learning video editing and experimenting with completely new ways of presenting business content. And this morning, Grant said something about us, as business owners, always trying to stay ahead of the curve. It made me think about how many times we have actually done this. One of the biggest examples for us was programmatic advertising.

And before I go any further, because I realize not everybody spends their days thinking about media buying, let me explain what I mean.Programmatic advertising is essentially a way of buying digital advertising through technology rather than negotiating every individual placement directly with a website or publisher. It allows advertisers to reach specific audiences across thousands of websites, apps, streaming environments and other digital spaces, often in real time. If you have ever been reading an article online and noticed a banner ad, watched a video with an ad before or during it, or used an app where advertising appeared, there is a good chance some of that advertising was purchased programmatically. That is the simple explanation.

The complicated part is how it is bought, where those ads actually appear, who is seeing them and whether anyone is paying enough attention to what happens after the campaign is turned on. And that is really what this story is about. Because when programmatic advertising first entered my world, I was fascinated by it. I was also suspicious of it.

My Relationship With Programmatic Advertising Started With Suspicion

When programmatic advertising first started becoming part of the media world, I was still working at an agency as a media director. At that time, programmatic felt a little like a newborn trying to hold its head up.

Interesting. Full of potential. But still very wobbly.

As somebody who has always liked being hands-on with my media buys, I immediately had mixed feelings about it.

I loved the idea.

What I didn’t love was handing a major part of a client’s campaign to a third party and then waiting for somebody else to tell me what was happening. I wanted to understand it. More importantly, I wanted to run it myself. A couple of years later, Grant and I started Dalilu Communications, and suddenly that same question came back – only now it mattered even more. These were our clients. Our recommendations. Our reputation.

Then we were approached to work on a national campaign where programmatic advertising needed to be part of the media mix. We contracted two different vendors to run portions of the campaign. And that experience changed everything for me.

The Numbers Looked Fantastic. That Was the Problem.

On paper, the campaigns looked great. High click-through rates. Low CPMs. Lots of impressions. If you looked only at the report, you could easily conclude that the campaign was performing beautifully. But then I started looking at where the advertising was actually appearing and where some of the traffic was coming from. Back then, you could see much more of this information inside Google Analytics.

Oh, back in the days, how I loved that feature.

Today?

Different story.

Now we deal with privacy changes, modelling, estimates and much less visibility into some of the information we used to be able to dig into directly. But back to the story. When I looked at some of the placements and traffic patterns, I was appalled. Some of them simply didn’t make sense. So naturally, we started asking questions. Why were we appearing here? Why was this domain generating so much traffic? What was being optimized? What exactly were we buying?

The more questions we asked, the slower the answers became. Sometimes we received answers that technically contained words but somehow still didn’t answer the question. It felt a little like talking to customer service at a large department store. You know there is probably a logical explanation somewhere in the building, but nobody you are talking to seems able to give it to you. Eventually Grant and I looked at each other and basically said:

We can do this better.

And if we were going to recommend programmatic advertising to our clients, we wanted to understand exactly what we were recommending.

So We Learned How to Do It Ourselves

We found a programmatic platform headquartered in Chicago with Canadian connections and immediately started training. Within about a month, we were on a plane to Chicago to complete their certification program and become programmatic tactic certified professionals.

At the time, our children were still very young. Our youngest was only two. For me as a mom, leaving for four days was difficult. My parents don’t live in Canada, and we didn’t have grandparents available to simply move into the house for a few days and take over. We had to arrange childcare and trust that everything would be okay while we were gone. I remember being terrified about leaving. Professionally, however, it turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made. Learning to run programmatic campaigns ourselves gave me two things I value enormously:

Freedom and confidence.

And something else happened that I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time. Running the campaigns myself began making me a better media planner.

Hands-On Learning Changes the Way You Think

There is something completely different about learning a media platform by actually working inside it every day.

You learn by doing. You learn what happens when you change a frequency cap. You see which domains behave strangely. You discover which audiences respond differently. You learn when a targeting strategy is too narrow and when it is far too loose. And you learn things about audiences that no textbook, presentation or vendor sales deck can really teach you.

Retargeting campaigns are a great example. By watching an audience over time, I can start seeing patterns in the types of websites and content that audience consumes. That knowledge doesn’t disappear when the campaign ends. Maybe months later I am planning a completely different campaign for another client trying to reach a similar audience. Now I have somewhere to start. I have learned something. Maybe I have discovered a group of domains frequently visited by that type of audience. Nobody handed me that list. Nobody sent me a PowerPoint saying, ‘Michaela, here are the websites you should buy.

I learned it through planning campaigns, buying the media, watching the behaviour and optimizing the campaigns myself. Then I carry that knowledge into the next strategy. That is where being both the media planner and the media buyer becomes incredibly valuable. One part of my work continuously teaches the other. Perhaps that is the VIP treatment our campaigns receive. Not because there is some secret formula available only to us.

It is simply because the person who developed the strategy is also looking at what is actually happening inside the campaign.

Creative and Media Cannot Live in Separate Rooms

Hands-on buying also changes the way you think about creative. Creative and media cannot live in two separate rooms. If a piece of creative is trying to communicate a lot of information, for example, perhaps the audience needs more opportunities to see it. A higher frequency might make sense. If the message is extremely simple, the answer might be completely different. There isn’t one magical frequency number that works for everything.

It depends.

What are we asking people to understand?

How complicated is the message?

How long is the campaign?

How large is the audience?

What other media are supporting it?

How many creative executions are running?

There are always variables. Because I both plan the media and operate campaigns, what I learn from one campaign feeds directly into the next media plan. That is probably the part I value most.

Planning defines what the campaign should accomplish.

Buying shows me what actually happens.

Optimization helps me understand why.

And the next plan becomes better because of everything I learned from the campaign before it.

Sometimes a Great CTR Is a Warning Sign

This is also why I don’t automatically celebrate when I see an unusually high click-through rate. Someone might look at the report and think: Fantastic! Look how many people clicked.

My reaction is often: Why?

And then I start investigating.

If I am running page-load tracking on the campaign landing page, I can compare ad clicks with the people who actually reached the website.

Where are those clicks coming from?

Are people really reaching the page?

Is one domain generating an unusually large percentage of the activity?

Does the behaviour actually make sense?

Sometimes a placement produces numbers that are simply too good to be true. And instead of celebrating it, I pause it.

Because great numbers don’t always mean great performance.

Sometimes they are a red flag. Imagine running a province-wide campaign and suddenly noticing an unusually high level of engagement coming from one tiny rural community in the middle of nowhere. Maybe the town has spectacular internet. Maybe everybody there happens to be incredibly enthusiastic about whatever we are advertising. Maybe there is a perfectly logical explanation. But my investigator’s instinct is still going to kick in. If a community of a few thousand people suddenly appears to be generating hundreds and hundreds of clicks, I want to know why.

There is something fishy in the data. Could it be legitimate? Sure. But that is exactly when the little red light in your head should come on. Don’t celebrate yet. Look.

Programmatic Impressions Are Not Garbage

Every once in a while, I hear someone say that programmatic impressions are garbage. Actually, let me be fair. I have heard one particularly loud voice saying it repeatedly. And I strongly disagree. Social media is an incredibly powerful advertising tool. We spend a ridiculous amount of time scrolling through social platforms and living inside our comfortable, beautifully curated little bubbles. But surely we still do other things online. We read articles, check the news, read entertainment stories, research things, visit websites, stream video, and yes, some of us play cute little games on our phones when nobody is watching.

So no.

Programmatic advertising is not garbage.

Badly managed programmatic advertising can absolutely be garbage.

There is a very important difference. If programmatic isn’t working well, perhaps the question shouldn’t automatically be whether programmatic itself is useless.

The first question should be:

How is it being used?

Media Works Better When It Works Together

There is another reason I don’t believe in dismissing programmatic in favour of social media.

Reach.

If your entire digital strategy exists on one or two social platforms, you are intentionally limiting your brand to those environments. You might reach a lot of people there. But those platforms still represent only one part of their overall media day. Someone might see your brand on social media in the morning. Later they read an article and encounter the campaign again. That evening they stream something. Perhaps the next morning they hear your radio commercial while driving. Then two days later they Google the product.

Which impression caused the conversion? Good luck answering that perfectly.

That is why I have always believed in looking at media holistically rather than constantly asking which single platform is the winner. The media can work together. Expanding across appropriate tactics can increase reach, build familiarity and may create a greater opportunity for conversion. You’ll notice I deliberately say may or can. I don’t say it will convert. Because media isn’t black and white. There are always variables.

The offer. The product. Creative. Competition. Timing. Budget. The website. The economy. The audience.

And probably another twenty things we haven’t even thought about.

That uncertainty is part of what keeps this job challenging.

And, most of the time, fun.

The Problem Is Often “Set It and Forget It”

If a programmatic campaign is launched with extremely loose targeting, no thoughtful domain strategy, very little optimization and nobody regularly reviewing where the budget is actually going, you can burn through an enormous number of impressions while accomplishing very little. Mobile games are a good example.

There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising inside a game if the audience and campaign make sense. But if an enormous percentage of your daily budget starts disappearing into gaming apps, questionable websites or placements producing suspicious amounts of activity, somebody should ask why. And this isn’t only a programmatic problem. I see the same mentality with Google Ads and other digital platforms.

Set it up. Turn it on. Come back later. Generate the report. Look at the numbers. Done.

Digital media shouldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it product.

Someone needs to be looking under the hood.

Ask What You Are Actually Buying

This is one of the simplest things I wish more marketers and clients would do. Ask questions before committing to the buy. Not ridiculous questions. Not questions for the sake of proving that you know marketing terminology. Basic media-buying questions.

What CPM are we buying at?

How many impressions are included?

What frequency should we expect?

Where can the advertising appear?

What exactly are we optimizing toward?

Then, once the campaign is running, ask to see placement or domain reporting when it is available and relevant. Look at it. You don’t need to panic every time you see a website you have never heard of. We all visit strange corners of the internet. There will always be noise. Nobody is going to create a perfectly pristine internet. But patterns matter. CPM in particular still surprises me. We work in a relatively small market, and I regularly see proposals where people focus almost entirely on the total price without asking one of the most basic questions before committing: What am I actually getting for that money?

If someone tells you a digital campaign costs $10,000, the $10,000 alone tells you very little. The proposal will usually tell you the audience. It will usually tell you the geography. It will tell you the campaign dates. Those things are expected. But what about the actual media inventory? How many impressions does that investment buy? What is the CPM? That matters. A proper media plan should make those numbers clear enough that you can understand what is actually being purchased.

Ask Questions. But Don’t Destroy a Good Vendor.

There is another side to this conversation that I think is just as important. Ask questions.

Absolutely.

Hold your media partners accountable. But don’t make their lives miserable simply to prove that you are paying attention. A good vendor is incredibly valuable. If somebody is proactive, transparent, thoughtful and genuinely looking after your campaign, treat that person like the professional they are. And I say this knowing full well that I am one of those clients who asks a lot of questions. I know I can be tough. Probably very tough sometimes. And I am still learning to find the balance I am talking about.

But after doing this for as long as I have, I can usually tell the difference between somebody who has made a reasonable decision I happen to question and somebody who is giving me an answer because they haven’t actually been paying attention to the campaign. You see it in the numbers. You see it in the answers. You see it in how quickly someone understands what you are asking.

And perhaps this brings the whole story back to why Grant and I decided to bring programmatic buying in-house in the first place. We believed we could do a better job for our clients. There was also another very practical incentive. We own the company. If we don’t do good work, clients eventually don’t hire us. And if clients don’t hire us, there isn’t magically a paycheque arriving for Dalilu at the end of the month. That creates a particular kind of motivation. I am not saying that someone working for a salary doesn’t care about doing excellent work.

Many of the best people I work with are employees of other companies and care tremendously. But ownership does change the equation. When your name, reputation and livelihood are tied directly to the work, you feel it differently. And maybe that is another reason I have always wanted to understand what is happening inside the campaigns rather than simply accepting the report. Still, balance matters. I have vendors I trust enormously because over time they have shown me that they care about our clients’ campaigns. Those relationships matter too.

Good media has always required judgement. Technology hasn’t changed that. If anything, technology has made judgement even more important.

Being Ahead of the Curve Doesn’t Mean Knowing Everything First

Thinking about all of this now, I don’t believe Grant and I have somehow been able to predict where advertising or technology is going. That isn’t what being ahead of the curve means to me. It means noticing that something is changing and becoming curious enough to start learning before you are forced to. Programmatic was one of those moments. Today, I find myself doing it again with video. AI is another obvious one. And I am sure there will be another one after that. The tools keep changing. The uncomfortable learning periods keep coming. And every time, at the beginning, it feels like I know absolutely nothing. The line barely moves.

I make mistakes. I Google things. I watch tutorials. I try something. I hate it. I redo it.

And then, without really noticing exactly when it happened, things start connecting.

The curve changes.

That might actually be the biggest lesson I have learned from trying to stay ahead of anything. You don’t need to know everything first. You just need to be willing to start learning while the line is still flat. Because if you keep going long enough, sometimes that learning curve starts to look very Canadian.

Like a hockey stick.