for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, May 6-8 in Palm Springs.
This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →
“Cheap” and “reach” are typically favored terms among advertisers. But taken together, they spell the next potential target for the digital ad industry to weed out.
“Cheap reach” refers to a subset of digital ad inventory that may be often overlooked — literally — and may be a necessary new taxonomy to prevent legitimate publishers from getting caught up in the crackdown on made-for-advertising sites. In the video below, Digiday media editor Kayleigh Barber helps to break down what cheap reach is, why this inventory category was created and why advertisers are not yet scrambling to excise it from their ad buys.
More in Media Buying
Ad Tech Briefing: The days of bloat are over, as efficiency drives ad tech’s C-suite exodus
Faced with increasing competition from LLMs, ad tech players have to better demonstrate their value-add.
Digiday+ Research: Agencies punt budget growth expectations to 2027 — while AI worries intensify
Agencies’ top concerns this year are client spending and the effects of AI, according to a Digiday+ Research survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2025 among 62 agency professionals.
As upfront negotiations near, buyers chart path through complex sports market
The DOJ’s NFL probe highlights how sports rights complexity can be ‘good for pricing, but hard on strategy’ for brands and buyers.