Working media
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
The number that makes fee comparisons real. A 10% platform fee on top of a 15% data cost and an agency retainer is not a 10% cost, and every intermediary between the advertiser and the publisher takes its share before the money arrives. This site publishes no figure for how much of a typical pound survives that journey, because it has no sourced one. Any platform that cannot tell you its own working-media percentage is telling you something.
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.
Take rate
The share of an advertiser's media budget retained by the platform rather than spent on media, whether that share is disclosed or embedded in the price. The word is neutral about disclosure, which is why the useful question is the figure rather than the policy.
Ad tech tax
The cumulative share of an advertiser's budget taken by the intermediaries between advertiser and publisher — demand platform, exchange, supply platform, data vendors, verification — none of which individually looks large.
CPM
The cost of one thousand advertising impressions, and the standard price unit for advertising bought on attention rather than on action. Television, streaming, audio, out-of-home and cinema are all quoted this way.
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