I finally saw a real-time bidding war at a conference in Denver and it flipped my ad strategy

At the Denver Digital Summit, I watched two agencies fight over the same audience segment, driving the CPM from $8 to over $25 in under a minute. One side argues you should always set aggressive manual bids to win key placements, while the other says you should just trust the platform's automated systems to keep costs down. Has anyone else been in a live auction that made them change their bidding rules?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_hayden18d ago

Yeah that's wild. I saw something similar at a conference last year. It made me stop using full automation for our top campaigns. Now I use a mix, automated for broad stuff but I'll jump in with manual bids for our must-win audiences, like people who just visited our pricing page. Letting the algorithm run everything on those just lost us the spot every time.

reese_rodriguez8618d ago

Oh man, that reminds me of my old boss who would just blindly trust the scheduling app. It double-booked us like three times in one week.

harper91418d ago

Three times in one week is insane. My last job had a system that would just delete shifts if someone called out sick. Came in on a Tuesday to find out I was supposed to be covering a lunch rush two hours earlier.