The Set-and-Forget Teardown: Finding the Mistakes in 3 Programmatic Media Plans

Marketing Academy · Field Work●Paid Ads

All projects·From: Programmatic Advertising

MiniTeardown· 25 minutes

Sea Limited (Shopee, Garena parent)

Objective: Given 3 synthetic programmatic campaign setup summaries, correctly identify which brand-safety, targeting, or auction-mechanics mistakes each one contains.

You're auditing 3 draft programmatic campaign setups for Shopee before they go live across Southeast Asia.

Read each setup cold, flag every mistake against the lesson's framework, then check the answer key.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets

FreeLog each plan's flagged defects and severity

Free, sufficient for a 3-plan review

The process

Specimens to review

This plan is about to launch. What would you flag before approving it?

Sample output

MEDIA PLAN 1 — 'Shopee 11.11 Retargeting'
Buying method: Open web, all exchange inventory
Brand safety filters: None configured
Frequency cap: None set
Ad verification tool: Not integrated
Floor price: Exchange default

Specimen: synthetic, realistic

Is this plan ready to launch, or is something still missing?

Sample output

MEDIA PLAN 2 — 'Shopee App Install Push'
Buying method: Whitelist of 4,200 vetted publisher domains
Brand safety filters: Configured, excludes 12 content categories
Frequency cap: 3 impressions per user per week
Ad verification tool: Integrated, weekly placement report review scheduled

Specimen: synthetic, realistic

Is programmatic RTB actually the right buying method for this specific plan?

Sample output

MEDIA PLAN 3 — 'Shopee Seller Onboarding, B2B'
Audience: Small business owners in 3 mid-sized cities, estimated reach 40,000
Buying method: Programmatic RTB, automated bidding
Goal: Hyper-local reach to a narrow professional segment

Specimen: synthetic, realistic

Final deliverable

A defect log across all 3 media plans, each item tagged critical/moderate/cosmetic, with Plan 2 correctly identified as launch-ready.

See a reference example

Sample output

Grab, media plan teardown (excerpt)

Plan A: no brand safety filters, no verification tool — CRITICAL x2
Plan B: whitelist + filters + frequency cap + verification — READY, no defects
Plan C: RTB applied to a 15,000-reach niche audience — MODERATE, wrong buying method

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

Flags both critical defects in Plan 1 (no brand safety filters, no verification tool)
Correctly identifies Plan 2 as defect-free rather than inventing a problem
Identifies Plan 3's mismatch between programmatic RTB and a hyper-local niche audience