The media, marketing & AI glossary – explained the way we’d explain it in a meeting.
Most glossaries read like they were written for a textbook. This one’s written the way we’d actually answer if you asked us across a table – plain, direct, and tied back to guides we’ve already written and services we actually deliver. If a term isn’t here yet, ask us and we’ll add it.
The building blocks
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
What you pay per 1,000 ad impressions. It’s a volume metric, not a performance one – a cheap CPM on the wrong audience is still wasted spend. Run your own numbers in our media calculators.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
The percentage of people who saw an ad and clicked it. Useful as a directional signal, dangerous as a target on its own – optimising purely for CTR tends to reward clickbait creative over actual conversion quality.
Programmatic Advertising
Buying and selling ad inventory through automated auctions rather than manual insertion orders. It’s the plumbing behind most digital display, video and CTV buying today.
DSP (Demand-Side Platform)
The software advertisers and agencies use to buy inventory programmatically across multiple publishers and exchanges at once. See our full breakdown: Demystifying Digital Media: Demand Side Platforms.
SSP (Sell-Side Platform)
The publisher-side equivalent of a DSP – the technology that lets publishers offer inventory into programmatic auctions. Worth a read: Disputing the “Dumb Pipes” Theory: The Evolution of SSPs.
Header Bidding
A technique letting publishers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before calling their ad server, generally driving higher yield than the old waterfall setup. See Header Bidding: Revolutionizing Digital Advertising and client-side vs. server-side setups compared.
SPO (Supply Path Optimisation)
Reducing the number of intermediaries between advertiser and publisher in a programmatic transaction – fewer hops usually means less fee leakage and better transparency. We’ve written a full guide: Enhancing Programmatic Efficiency and a step-by-step SPO strategy guide.
Viewability
Whether an ad was actually capable of being seen (met a minimum pixel/time-in-view threshold), not just served. A served-but-unviewable impression is money spent on nothing. See Ad Viewability: Considerations for Marketers and Publishers.
Bid Duplication
When the same impression gets bid on multiple times through different supply paths, inflating perceived demand and distorting real performance data. See Bid Duplication Risks And Challenges For Marketers.
MFA (Made-for-Advertising) Sites
Low-quality sites built purely to harvest ad impressions rather than serve genuine content or audiences – a real brand safety and wastage risk in programmatic buys. See Why Made-For-Advertising Sites Can Damage Your Brand.
What you can (and can’t) do with data
CDP (Customer Data Platform)
A system that unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single, persistent profile – the foundation most real personalisation is built on. Not every business needs one; see CDP Considerations: Do You Actually Need One? and the deeper dive on CDPs.
Clean Room
A secure environment where two parties can match and analyse combined data sets without either side seeing the other’s raw, identifiable data. Increasingly the default for privacy-safe partner data collaboration. See Out-Of-Home Advertisers Embracing Clean Rooms.
Zero-Party Data
Data a customer deliberately and proactively shares with you – preferences, survey answers, stated intent. The most trustworthy data category there is, because there’s no inference involved. See Why Marketers Need To Embrace Zero-Party Data.
Data Governance
The rules, roles and controls that determine how data can be collected, used and shared inside an organisation. Boring until it isn’t – this is exactly where a lot of AI and personalisation projects quietly stall. See Breaking Down Data Barriers, Fostering Innovation.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)
Assigning credit across multiple touchpoints in a customer’s journey, rather than crediting a single “last click.” More accurate than single-touch models, harder to implement well. See Multi-Touch Attribution: Measuring the Full Customer Journey and offline attribution for the physical world.
Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Identifiers
Deterministic IDs are based on confirmed data (a login, an email match); probabilistic ones are inferred (device/browser signals). As third-party cookies fade, the industry is leaning harder on deterministic approaches. See Thriving in a Cookieless Era.
Privacy Sandbox
Google’s initiative to replace third-party cookie tracking in Chrome with privacy-preserving alternatives. Still evolving, still disruptive to how targeting and measurement work. See The Role of Adtech in the Privacy Sandbox Era and a retrospective on Google’s cookie conundrum.
Apple’s Private Click Measurement (PCM)
Apple’s privacy-preserving alternative for measuring ad clicks and conversions on iOS/Safari without exposing individual user data to advertisers. See What Is Apple’s Private Click Measurement?
Where the hype ends and the actual capability starts
Generative AI (GenAI)
AI models that produce new content – text, image, video – rather than just classifying or predicting from existing data. Genuinely useful for scaling creative production; genuinely risky without brand and compliance guardrails. See Is Generative AI Good or Bad for Your Business?
AI Governance
The frameworks and review processes that decide how AI gets used responsibly – covering consent, bias, compliance and brand risk before a use case reaches production. We deliver this in partnership with FMA Consulting. See our Governance & AI services.
LLM (Large Language Model)
The underlying model architecture behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude – trained on huge text datasets to generate and reason about language. See Balancing the Strengths and Limitations of LLMs for Marketers.
Synthetic Media & Deepfakes
AI-generated video, audio or images that mimic real people or footage. A growing creative tool and a growing brand-safety and misinformation risk simultaneously. See Synthetic Media and its Role in Advertising and navigating the deepfake threat.
Propensity Modelling
Using historical data to predict the likelihood a customer will take a specific action – buy, churn, upgrade. Powers a lot of “next best action” personalisation under the hood. See The Power of Propensity Modeling in Marketing.
Lookalike Modelling
Finding new prospects who resemble your best existing customers, based on shared data patterns – a common way to scale acquisition beyond your known audience. See Expanding Reach: A Deep Dive into Lookalike Modeling.
Where the revenue actually gets made
Retail Media Network (RMN)
A retailer’s own advertising platform, letting brands buy placements across the retailer’s site, app and sometimes in-store, on-site and near-site inventory. See Unpacking Retail Media: The eCommerce Revolution, key questions to ask your retail media partners, and how RMNs affect attribution.
Self-Serve Advertising
Ad platforms that let advertisers (often SMBs) set up, launch and manage their own campaigns directly, without needing a sales rep or agency in the loop. See Self-Serve Advertising Driving Growth.
Yield Management
Optimising pricing and inventory allocation across channels to maximise total revenue, not just fill rate. See Pricing, Inventory & Revenue Growth.
Ad Networks
Aggregators that pool inventory from multiple publishers and sell it to advertisers as a bundle – still a meaningful revenue channel for publishers who don’t want to manage direct sales themselves. See Ad Networks’ Value to Publishers.
Traffic Shaping
Deliberately directing or restricting where and how ad requests are sent, used both legitimately (yield optimisation) and illegitimately (fraud). See What Is Traffic Shaping And Its Impact On Monetization.
Affiliate Marketing
Paying a third party a commission for driving a sale or lead, typically tracked via a unique link or code. See our comprehensive guide to affiliate marketing.
Turning data into relevance, not just noise
Segmentation
Grouping customers by shared characteristics – behaviour, demographics, value – so messaging and offers can be tailored rather than blasted uniformly. See demographic targeting and customer personas and behavioural segmentation.
Personalisation
Tailoring content, offers or experience to an individual based on known or inferred data – done well, it feels helpful; done badly, it feels invasive. See Personalization Bridging Customers to Brands and how to avoid personalisation pitfalls.
Triggered Campaigns
Automated messages fired by a specific customer action or event (cart abandonment, sign-up, milestone), rather than sent on a fixed schedule. See Effective Triggered Personalization in Media.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
The system of record for customer data and interaction history, and usually the operational backbone of lifecycle marketing. See CRM best tactics and advanced CRM management techniques.
Cross-Sell & Upsell
Cross-sell offers a complementary product; upsell offers a higher-value version of what’s already being considered. Both lean on understanding where a customer actually is in their journey. See Cross-Sell Wins: Revenue Growth Tactics.
Lapsed Customer Re-engagement
Winning back customers who’ve gone quiet, typically through targeted offers or messaging based on why they’re likely to have lapsed in the first place. See our guide to re-engaging lapsed customers.
The unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether change sticks
Digital Transformation
Restructuring how a business operates around digital capability – not just buying new software, but changing process, people and governance to actually use it. See our full services breakdown for how we approach this in practice.
Operating Model
How decisions actually get made and work actually gets done inside an organisation – roles, governance forums, escalation paths. Most transformation programs fail here, not in the technology.
MarTech Stack
The full set of marketing technology tools an organisation runs – CDP, CMS, email/lifecycle platform, analytics, personalisation engine – and critically, how well (or badly) they talk to each other. See Demystifying Martech and making wise MarTech investments.
CMS (Content Management System)
The platform used to create, manage and publish digital content – increasingly also the engine behind on-site personalisation, not just a place to post articles. See CMS best practices and powering personalisation through your CMS.
Tag Manager
A layer that lets teams deploy and manage tracking/marketing tags without needing a developer for every change – genuinely useful, frequently misconfigured. See A Deep Dive into Tag Manager Capabilities and Best Practices.
Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM)
A statistical approach to measuring the incremental impact of different marketing channels on business outcomes, without relying on individual-level tracking. Increasingly relevant as cookie-based measurement declines. See Marketing Mix Modeling: How to Maximize ROI.
Brand Lift
Measuring the change in brand metrics (awareness, consideration, favourability) caused by a campaign, separate from direct-response performance. See The Power of Brand Uplift Measurement.
What people ask us
Why build a glossary instead of just linking to Wikipedia or IAB definitions?
Generic definitions don’t tell you why a term matters in practice, or point you to what to actually do about it. Every entry here links back to a full guide or a real service, so you’re never stuck at “now what?”
Is this glossary specific to Australia, or global?
The underlying concepts are global – CPM is CPM everywhere – but where regulation or market structure matters (privacy, retail media, data governance) we’ve written from an Australian context, since that’s where we operate.
I didn’t find the term I was looking for – can you add it?
Yes. Get in touch with what’s missing and we’ll add it.
How is this different from the Tech & Services Comparison hub?
This glossary explains the concepts; the Comparison hub evaluates the actual tools and platforms that implement them. Use this page to understand the “what,” and the Comparison hub to work out the “which one.”
I understand the terms but don’t know how to apply them to my business – what now?
That’s normal – a glossary can only take you so far. See our full range of services, or book a free consultation if you’d rather talk it through directly.
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MarTech & DataStack selection, CDP and lifecycle personalisation, GenAI for marketing. |
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Governance & AIData and AI governance, enterprise and FSI transformation. |
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