One Seat Per Brief: StackAdapt, Basis or Adform

We pick one seat per brief and put the reasoning in writing. Running the same creative across StackAdapt, Basis and Adform to see which wins is not a platform test: it splits your frequency three ways and measures supply path, which is why the winner changes every time the exercise is repeated. One seat, one plan, one frequency ceiling. How the seat gets chosen: Adform when European data residency and identity-free targeting are load-bearing — it is European-owned, keeps data in the EU, and its contextual and cohort routes hold up where consent rates are low. StackAdapt when native and contextual carry the campaign rather than support it, particularly for recruitment, where the creative unit that works looks like an article promo and not a banner. Basis when the media plan is mostly direct and programmatic guaranteed and the real difficulty is order management, publisher paperwork and billing reconciliation across dozens of line items that currently live in a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand. Recruitment without behavioural data: There is no reliable signal for a person considering a new job, and the third-party segments sold as one are inference dressed up as intent. We target the page instead of the person: job boards, trade titles, professional course and certification content, industry news at shift-change hours. For a client hiring HGV drivers, that means logistics trade press and specific route-planning and licence-renewal content, with creative naming the depot and the rate. Regional, dull, and it fills roles. Long sales cycles in logistics and industrial: Company-level IP targeting against a named account list, creative that changes by account tier, and reporting at account level rather than by impression. The KPI is meetings booked with named accounts, and we hold a control group of accounts deliberately unexposed so the sales team's inevitable claim that they would have closed anyway can be checked rather than argued about. Creative: Native is written, not resized. Headline, description and image are produced as native variants with the character limits respected, because a display banner squeezed into a native slot underperforms and then gets blamed on the platform. We write the variants. Production of video or animated display sits with your studio. What we refuse: We will not buy media on our own seat and resell it to you at a marked-up CPM, which is the standard commercial model on all three of these platforms and the reason their pricing is opaque in most agency relationships. We will not hold a retainer across multiple seats when one would do. And we do not take platform incentives, rebates or trading deals from any of the three. Not included: Ad server migration, DOOH planning, search and social, landing page work. We will tell you when the landing page is the actual constraint, and in recruitment it usually is — an application flow that takes eleven minutes on a phone cannot be fixed by better media. Wrong fit if: You want a platform bake-off. You need a seat in the agency's name for procurement. Your creative consists of one static banner set and there is no appetite to write native variants. Or the brief is national brand awareness with a reach target, which these seats can serve but where a broadcast or out-of-home planner will give you better advice than we will.