Upper-funnel budget belongs where people are paying attention.
An upper-funnel ad only works if your buyer remembers it when they’re ready to choose. We put that budget where people actually watch and listen: streaming TV, high-impact online video, podcasts and streaming audio, bought programmatically, in the walled gardens and direct from podcast networks. Every buy is aimed at a signal that predicts revenue and built on your first-party data.
Streaming TV and podcasts prove themselves in different ways:
Streaming TV and video: point the algorithm at an early signal.
YouTube already sells the TV screen, LinkedIn sells it by job title, and Pinterest bought a performance-TV platform. TV now runs on the same signals as search and social, and we run it the same way. An algorithm can’t wait 90 days for a closed-won deal, so we find the signal that predicts one for your business, such as site visits from exposed households, branded search lift or new-customer rate, and make that the target.
Podcasts: build the measurement before the first episode airs.
Host-read ads took nearly half the audio budgets we’ve managed, and more in B2B, where a host your buyer already trusts carries weight a banner never will. They’re also harder to measure, because nobody types a promo code into a demo request form. So before launch, we add a “How did you hear about us?” field to your forms, track listeners where the show allows it, and watch branded search and site traffic around each air date.
We concentrate the bet.
One or two channels, funded deep enough to read a result.
We choose what it chases.
The early signal that predicts revenue for your business, from exposed-household site visits to video-completion rate.
We control where it runs.
Verified premium inventory, household frequency caps and existing-customer exclusions, so a cheap CPM doesn’t buy a screen nobody’s watching.
We prove it before it scales.
Holdouts on streaming TV, air-date tracking on podcasts, and budget that moves with the result.
We don’t call it awareness until the lift test does.
Display wins on CPM. Video and audio win on lift.
In the lift tests we’ve run, streaming TV, online video, podcasts and streaming audio have consistently beaten programmatic display. A full-screen video has time to tell a story, and an audio ad gets the listener’s full attention in their ears. A display ad is the easiest ad on the internet to ignore. Most mid-market budgets fund one or two of these bets, so we prove the first flight before we fund the second. Which test answers which question →
