Media Buying Briefing: FullThrottle offers an easy button for smaller agencies and brands

One such company, FullThrottle Technologies, shared with Digiday its revamped platform, fullthrottle.ai, which it’s rolled out broadly to both agencies and small- and mid-sized businesses that are looking to control more of their media investment destiny. 

According to Amol Waishampayan, FullThrottle’s co-founder and chief product officer, the platform builds on its existing platform, with a three-pointed aim to simplify the identification of target audiences, setting efficient and effective marketing plans, and measuring the results of the effort — all in one “easy” service. It offers a cookieless identity graph, AI-powered planning tools, activation through its own DSP-like offering, and outcomes measurement and attribution.  It also helps shepherd creative throughout the process to avoid the wrong creative to run in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

In essence, it’s part planning tool, part DSP, part walled-garden avoidance machine — and part champion of the open internet, said Waishampayan, in that it offers access to 120 million U.S. households across CTV, display, video, audio, and most other channels outside of search and social. 

“One interesting trend that we’ve noticed, and why we’ve put ourselves at this intersection, is that the mid market space with SMBs is more complicated because it’s so underserved,” said Waishampayan. “You can’t really get The Trade Desk to bend the knee, like they say in Game of Thrones” when you’re a smaller brand or media agency. With fullthrottle.ai, he said “you can get something that’s made especially … to bring that firepower at the agency level, and have enough firepower that permeates all the way down to the direct brand. AI, I think, has leveled and made that possible. It simplifies complexity at a time when the complexity of the mid market is probably the greatest.”

There’s a lot of mid-market out there, it seems. FullThrottle has signed up close to 6,100 customers, mostly through small agencies and brands they serve, and Waishampayan said the company’s revenue for 2025 is up 30% over 2024, declining to share an exact revenue figure. 

“It also is an attribution and outcome engine. It shows you all everything else that we’re aware of that people are clicking on Facebook ads, paid search ads, and we are in taking all of that brands transactional data.

One company using fullthrottle.ai is Stream Companies, a marketing agency group specializing in auto, healthcare, commerce and home services. Dave Regn, CEO and co-founder of Stream, said being able to avoid the walled gardens like Google and Meta makes working with FullThrottle worthwhile. 

“With the walled gardens of Google and Facebook, you have to play by their rules, you have to operate in their ecosystem,” said Regn. “All those things as agencies that we we have to navigate every day, it’s really solved for those things. To be able to have someone build out a campaign and in under five minutes activate it, and then be able to have that full measurement end to end … has really just been a game changer.” 

As to cost of the platform, Waishampayan said it starts with a fixed platform price per advertiser based on a sliding scale of size (from as low as $600 a month to $20,000 a month), plus some degree of DSP fees and the amount of AI each customer uses — he likened fullthrottle.ai to Waymo in that the customer can let the platform do everything, or can be as hands on as they want.

Regn said the value relative to the expense has been worth it. “It’s very cost efficient to the value that you’re getting from the platform,” he added. “Google is our single largest spend as an agency, and it has been for a long time. I think what this gives us is the ability and and freedom to truly be able to innovate for our clients.”

Joy Baer, a tech consultant who is chair of FullThrottle Tech’s advisory board, pointed to that efficiency blended with self-service as the value she sees in going to market. “The combination of being able to identify audiences, market to those audiences, and then measure, [enables] a very simple, turnkey, but yet very powerful and sophisticated capability,” said Baer.  She noted that small and mid-sized businesses may not have enough spending power to reach minimum-spend thresholds by the big DSPs like The Trade Desk. 

Given the crush of ad-tech vendors looking to muscle into this same space, what makes fullthrottle.ai different? To Baer’s thinking, it’s about bringing the audience identification, the marketing investment and the post-campaign outcomes and attribution measurement all in one place. “The marketplace is noisy and it is a busy landscape … but we were really specific about differentiating the technology to create this really sophisticated targeting of audiences capability in a platform that’s really easy to use.”

Smaller agencies could always use an easy button, especially one that enables them to act like their larger counterparts, and avoid being bullied by the big tech giants. To Regn, fullthrottle.ai’s embrace of the open internet is what’s needed. As he summed up: “The way that I look at it is, the open internet is everyone versus Google, Facebook and Amazon.” 

Color by numbers

Given that October will be Hispanic Heritage Month, a new Nielsen report shed some light on the growing demographic — which will likely be a key to success for any politician looking to win in the 2026 mid-term elections. And with the World Cup in the U.S. next year, the cohort will also loom large as an important audience to court. Here are some stats from the report:

• Hispanics generate $4.1 trillion in purchasing power;
• Streaming makes up 55.8% of their total TV time, compared to 46% for the rest of the U.S.; Netflix, YouTube and Disney’s streaming platforms are major destinations.
• Hispanics are 115% more likely to use the CapCut graphic design app and 29% more likely to use AI platforms like ChatGPT, but less than 1% of U.S. digital ad spend goes to Spanish-language sites;
• Hispanics are 39% more likely to be avid MLS fans and 40% already identify as World Cup fans.

Takeoff & landing

• WPP took another step toward restructuring its leadership, this time in the U.K., by getting rid of individual agency CEO titles and setting a clear client-first org chart. Natalie Cummins, former CEO of EssenceMediacom UK, was made WPP Media president responsible for clients. Jem Lloyd Williams, former Mindshare UK CEO, will be UK chief strategy officer and president in charge of Mindshare clients. Jon Stevens, former chief growth officer for Wavemaker, will oversee Wavemaker clients as a WPP Media president. Finally, Kelly Parker, former CEO of Wavemaker UK was named chief media officer for the region. Parker will also oversee a newly created division called Media Management and Delivery. 
• Publicis Media landed dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina’s global media business, effective in 2026, winning it after a review from WPP’s Wavemaker, which previously managed the account in the Netherlands.
• Goodby Silverstein & Partners tapped Sarah Thompson to be its next CEO, coming over from Accenture Interactive, where she helped integrate Droga5 into that consultancy. The move marks a return for Thompson to GS&P, where she essentially started her career in the 1990s. 
• R/GA named designer Ren Rigby its first-ever global chief brand officer, who also boomerangs back to the agency from consultancy Proto, which they co-founded.

Direct quote

“Every brand can buy their way into somebody’s life, and you buy an impression, you pay for it. That’s fine. But how do you design programs that live beyond the placement? And that’s always been a focus … How do you eliminate friction from from the process? We get a lot of digital signals through our media, but we don’t listen to them all the time. So how are we adjusting based off of what they [the consumers] need next to get them to a transaction?”

— Preston Larson, new CEO of Court Avenue’s Modifly, as well as chief media officer for Court Avenue.

Speed reading

• Seb Joseph took a look into fourth quarter 2025 expected ad spend, and found that spending continues apace but worrying signs on the horizon could point to trouble ahead. 
• Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon teamed up to dig into the motivations behind Amazon’s unusual but possibly smart move to add Netflix ad inventory to its DSP offering — despite their competitive nature as streamers. 
• A few good stories came out of last week’s Retail Media Ad Strategies event that Digiday put on with sibling Modern Retail. Kimeko McCoy wrote about her sit-down with a Bayer exec who explained how she’s pushing retail media networks to offer more insights and alternatives to the walled gardens. And Modern Retail’s Mitchell Parton cataloged how Mars spends its retail media dollars, courtesy of global head of media Ron Amram. 
• Sam Bradley took a look at early marketing action around the 2026 World Cup, noting some brands that have already invested in the tournament.