Paid social
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Social was £11.5bn of the UK market in 2025 on AA/WARC figures. For most buyers, on its own, the platforms' own managers are free and better, and this site says so. The reason paid social is in a seven-channel product at all 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. AdBuyMCP holds one audience definition and lets Meta and TikTok each resolve it into whatever they actually offer, which avoids maintaining two divergent definitions — but exact availability is resolved per platform and the plan says so. Interest terms score 62, demographics alone 48, a bare city buy 38.
Goes deeper: How social compiles
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.
Paid search
Advertising against what someone typed into a search engine, bought by keyword and match type and usually paid per click. The only major channel where the buyer is responding to stated intent rather than inferring it.
Lookalike audience
An audience built by finding people who resemble a seed group — usually the advertiser's existing customers — on whatever signals the platform holds. The resemblance model is the platform's and is not disclosed.
Deduplication
Removing the double-counting that occurs when the same person is reached by more than one channel or placement in a campaign, so that combined reach reflects distinct people rather than the sum of each channel's separate count.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
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