Paid social
Vendor-neutral until the moment of execution, then exactly as native as it needs to be.
3 bands, 62 down to 38
Three discrete values rather than a sliding scale. Which one your plan carries depends on what the brief gives the compiler to work with, and the rationale printed on the plan is the one printed here.
Platform-owned interest and demographic projection using buyer-authored terms; exact audience availability is resolved per platform.
The brief supplies interest terms.
Broad city and demographic projection only; no interest signal was supplied.
Demographics but no interests.
Broad city targeting only; add buyer-authored interests before treating this as a faithful persona projection.
Neither interests nor demographics.
Naming a city the UK geography table cannot map costs 15 points here as it does everywhere else, and the rationale on the plan names the city rather than dropping it quietly. That penalty applies on top of the bands above.
What your audience actually becomes here
There is no segment catalogue behind this channel. These are the inputs the compiler carries through from your own brief, with the provider that resolves them and the basis the lawful-basis manifest records.
Examples are drawn from the sandbox-scale slices of each taxonomy the platform ships with. The full exports load into the same shapes, so catalogue size does not change the compiler behaviour or the fidelity grade. Nothing here has yet run against a full production catalogue, because nothing has run live.
From one sentence to a Paid social targeting spec
Interest terms are taken from the brief verbatim — normalised and de-duplicated, never enriched — and handed to each platform's own audience resolution. The IAB Audience Taxonomy in the table below is registered for this channel, but the social compiler passes no catalogue entries at all, so nothing is matched against it. What it never emits is a platform audience identifier: the interests travel as plain-language hints rather than as Meta or TikTok audience ids, and exclusions are not compiled into audience ids either. That is the point and the limit of vendor-neutral semantics: AdBuyMCP holds one definition of the audience and each platform resolves it into whatever it offers, rather than you maintaining two divergent definitions in two ad managers.
The fastest way to see this is a real brief compiled live in the session rather than a worked example.
Talk it throughThe rails that reach this channel
2 of the 25 connectors the platform registers touch Paid social. Each one is graded on our own evidence ledger, which is deliberately blunt: a mocked HTTP test proves a client was written, not that a vendor accepted the request, spent money, or returned real delivery.
Meta AdsBuying API
Client builtPaid social on Facebook and Instagram, staged PAUSED until a human approves the exact creative bytes.
- What has to happen next
- The canary gate, passed separately, including an ad-account and Page identity check.
TikTok for BusinessBuying API
Client builtPaid social on TikTok. AI-generated video carries a self-disclosure provenance declaration that must survive the provider readback.
- What has to happen next
- The canary gate, plus exact AI-generation provenance on every selected video.
Named on this channel's compiled plans: Meta Ads · TikTok Ads. Across all 25 connectors, spend-tested stands at 0 and report-verified at 0, and a continuous-integration check keeps those two counts honest.
The whole supply matrix →What Paid social will take
Formats and the limits the product enforces on this channel. Where a limit is a schema constraint, over-long copy fails at the edge rather than being silently truncated on the way to a provider.
Bounded social copy
Headline 40 characters, description 30. Conservative portable limits that include TikTok's tighter 100-character text envelope, so one creative is valid on both platforms.
Video provenance
AI-generated video submitted to TikTok carries a SELF_DISCLOSURE declaration. Missing provenance blocks before any provider call, and the declaration must survive the provider readback at resume.
Asset production is charged separately and never blended into the media fee. The creative studio, in full
What Paid social can prove, and what it cannot
Same as search: provider delivery, observed response through your own analytics on the immutable campaign key, and no live conversion optimisation until the conversion definition is bound to an exact provider-owned action. Initial canaries are traffic and reach only.
Provider delivery, observed response, modelled estimates and powered causal evidence stay visibly separate on the report rather than being averaged into one number, and the geo-lift engine returns an underpowered verdict instead of a lift figure when the spend cannot carry the test. The four verbs, in full
Your own site's analytics, read through your token, so brand response is measured on data you already own and can audit.
GA4 as an alternative brand-response source where that is what the advertiser already runs.
What this will not pretend past.
Every one of the seven channel pages carries one of these, in the same type. The best this channel scores is 62, graded content-level, and the paragraph beside this is what that score does not cover.
Social was £11.5bn of the UK market in 2025 on AA/WARC figures, and you are already buying it. Meta and TikTok optimise their own inventory better than any third party will, and nothing here changes that. Sixty-two out of a hundred is an interest projection. The reason paid social is here is not that we buy it better — it is that a plan which ignores the channel carrying most of your budget cannot honestly claim to have deduplicated your audience or measured incremental reach.
If that limit is disqualifying for your budget, we would rather you heard it in the session than after the invoice.
Talk it throughThe same audience, compiled everywhere else
One audience definition, seven translations, seven published scores. A plan that funds two or three of these with enough weight to prove something beats one that puts a token line on all seven.
CTV & streaming TV
The one channel where a job title survives the translation almost intact.
3 bandsPaid search
One search plan. Two execution rails. Neither of them writes your keywords for you.
3 bandsPodcast & digital audio
You are not buying a person here. You are buying what they listen to.
fixed bandAddressable & linear TV
The fastest-growing channel on this list, and the one that needs the most paperwork.
fixed bandDigital out-of-home
A billboard cannot know who you are. It can know who walks past it.
fixed bandCinema
The lowest fidelity score on the site.
fixed bandSee what your audience compiles to on Paid social.
Forty-five minutes. Bring a real audience and we compile it live on Paid social and the other six, with the score and the lawful-basis manifest on screen.
Book a working sessionDesign-partner phase · the sandbox needs no card and no credentials · nothing here sells self-serve media
Paid social questions
Why would I buy social here instead of in Ads Manager?
For most buyers, on its own, you would not, and the page says so. The reason social is in the product is deduplication and incrementality: without the channel carrying most of your budget, a cross-channel frequency number is wrong and an incremental-reach claim is unsupportable. If you are only buying social, Ads Manager is free and better.
What does vendor-neutral actually mean here?
That the audience is defined once, in AdBuyMCP's own semantics, and each platform resolves that definition into whatever it offers. You are not maintaining one audience in Meta and a differently-worded one in TikTok and hoping they mean the same thing. What it does not mean is that the two will reach identical people — exact availability is resolved per platform, and the plan says so.