Twenty+ years on every side of the media trade.
Digitalent is a 1:1 consultancy for founders, brand marketers and media organisations who need a straight read on their media business — then an audit, an improvement plan, or a full pivot to go with it.
Fluent across the whole dial, not one frequency.
Most consultants specialise in a slice. The media business has moved from hand-placed bookings to algorithmic bidding in under a decade — this practice has sat inside each stage of that shift, often at the same time.
Traditional
TV, press, radio and out-of-home — where reach is still bought by the second and the page, and the negotiation still happens on the phone.
Digital
Social, search, display and video working as one plan rather than three separate budgets reporting three different truths.
Programmatic
DSPs, SSPs, PMPs and the supply path between them — header bidding, SPO, and the fees that quietly sit inside every auction.
Performance
Attribution, media mix modelling and incrementality — the discipline that tells you which of the above is actually working.
Agentic buying is already rewriting the brief.
Programmatic took the human out of the auction. Agentic, AI-run buying is starting to take the human out of the brief itself — systems that plan, bid and optimise with less oversight at every step. That doesn't just add a tool to the stack; it changes who's accountable for the outcome, how a contract gets written, and what a media team is actually for.
Commercial models
Agency fees and media owner rate cards were built around human trading hours, not autonomous, always-on bidding.
Accountability
Someone still has to answer for a decision an AI made, and show how that decision can be audited after the fact.
Team & structure
What a media function is hired to do once the trading itself increasingly runs on its own.
It's exactly the kind of shift this practice exists to get ahead of. See the audit → improve → pivot approach ↓
Three stages. One person across all of them.
No handoffs between a pitch team and a delivery team — the same person who runs the audit builds the plan and sits with you through the pivot.
Audit
A clear-eyed read of where the media budget actually goes, and what it's actually buying.
- Media mix & channel-fit review
- Contract, fee and rebate audit
- Supply path & SPO health check
- Measurement & attribution audit
Improve
Fixes that don't require rebuilding the business — just running it with better information.
- Renegotiated terms & consolidated supply
- Measurement rebuilt to a single source of truth
- Briefs, KPIs and reporting realigned
- Team or agency roles clarified
Pivot
When the audit says the model itself needs to change, not just the execution.
- In-house vs. agency model decisions
- Channel mix & budget reallocation
- New ad-tech stack selection
- Trading desk or first media hire built from scratch
Every seat at the table, not just one.
Having worked the buyer's desk, the seller's desk and the ad-tech stack between them means the advice accounts for how the other two sides will actually respond.
Startups & challenger brands
First media hires, first agency briefs, first programmatic spend — built so it doesn't need to be rebuilt at Series B.
Brands & media organisations
Mature marketing functions auditing legacy contracts, fragmented stacks and measurement nobody fully trusts any more.
Media owners & ad-tech platforms
Publishers, broadcasters and platforms reviewing yield, packaging and positioning from the buyer's point of view.
Advice from someone who's filled in the media plan, not just reviewed it.
Two decades spent buying media, selling media, and building the ad-tech that trades it means the recommendations hold up on every side of the negotiation — not just the client's. Every engagement is run on a discreet basis, with full NDA work welcomed as standard. That standing extends into the industry itself — board representation, council and committee chairmanship, and a direct hand in developing the standards those channels run on.
Start with a straight conversation.
No discovery deck, no procurement maze — tell me what the media business looks like today and where it's not adding up, and we'll work out whether it's an audit, an improvement, or a pivot.