Insertion order (IO)
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
The word that separates a channel you can buy in an afternoon from one that takes a fortnight. UK cinema and addressable television both transact this way: a brief goes to the sales house, clearance happens, an order is confirmed, and delivery is reconciled afterwards. AdBuyMCP automates the paperwork — generating the brief with the right audience packs, driving the clearance step, holding the state machine — but it does not make the booking and it does not report the delivery. Every live step is acknowledged by a named person quoting the sales house's own reference, and no live step advances on a timer.
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Cinema advertising
Advertising shown on cinema screens before a film, sold by audience packs, film genre and venue rather than by individual viewer. Delivered as a Digital Cinema Package and subject to its own age-rating clearance separate from broadcast clearance.
Addressable TV
Television advertising where different households watching the same programme at the same time receive different adverts, swapped in at the set-top box or in the stream. It is bought on household attributes and geography rather than on programme and time slot.
Programmatic advertising
Buying advertising through automated systems that decide, impression by impression, whether to bid and how much to pay for it. It describes the transaction mechanism rather than a channel: CTV, audio, DOOH and display can all be bought programmatically.
More on buying and commercials
How media is transacted and where the money goes. The terms in this group are the ones a fee conversation turns on.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through