Matched market
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Matching is done on the pre-campaign series rather than on demography, because two cities that look alike on paper often behave differently commercially. Getting this wrong is invisible in the output: a badly matched pair produces a confident number that means nothing, which is why the pairing and the power analysis both have to happen before the media runs.
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.
Geo-lift test
An experiment that runs advertising in some geographic markets and withholds it from comparable others, then compares outcomes between them. The causal design that needs no login, pixel or match rate.
Holdout
A group deliberately excluded from seeing a campaign and kept as a comparison against the group that was exposed to it. Without one, the counterfactual — what would have happened anyway — has to be assumed rather than observed.
Difference-in-differences
A method that compares the change in an exposed group against the change in a control group over the same period, so that anything moving both in step — seasonality, a competitor, the weather — cancels out.
More on measurement and evidence
What you can prove afterwards, and the difference between a number that means something and a number that does not.
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