Sometimes it’s easy to forget that media buying isn’t just a theoretical practice.
Which is why Carrie Drinkwater, who serves as the chief investment officer for Carat USA, often finds herself pulling anecdotes from her own life when she talks about her frustrations with the larger ad tech industry. And, boy, some of the stories she tells on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks sure are illuminating.
For example, Drinkwater mentions a time when her husband and young daughter were watching a children’s show on Disney+ without her and encountered an ad for a DSP. That ad was clearly targeted at Drinkwater, even though her family doesn’t use individual viewer profiles and the account is registered under her husband’s name.
“It’s so wild to me that this whole industry is so focused on targeting and data and tech, but you don’t know where you’re running and you don’t know who you’re targeting,” says Drinkwater.
Drinkwater originally came to Carat because she was excited about parent company Dentsu’s robust audience data. But, as she told AdExchanger in 2024 when she first started her role, the marketers still need to adopt a focused, client-specific approach to working with that data, rather than using it just for the sake of using it. She still stands by this.
To that end, Drinkwater prefers to think about media planning holistically – a term that gets bandied about as a buzzword, but Drinkwater defines it as “finding the consumers where we can have the greatest impact, not buying everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Also in this episode: why Drinkwater believes there’s no such thing as TV buyers anymore, how sports have become a must-buy and whether CTV works best as a lower- or higher-funnel channel. Plus: If you asked the average American what their favorite TV network is, would they actually have an answer?
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