The auction has no categories

For years I benchmarked against the category, and I had that wrong.

Every plan I built as a planner had a competitor slide. Three or four brands in the same aisle, their share of voice, the gap the plan was going to close. A sensible slide, about a competition that does not take place.

The auction does not know what a coffee brand is. When a bid goes in for an impression at nine on a Thursday night in Riyadh, the platform is asking who wants that person, and it does not care what they sell. The answer is a bank with a new card, a game opening its season this week, a delivery app spending into the weekend. Whoever has decided that the same minute of the same person is worth money.

From the platform side this is plain in the numbers, and it is invisible from the advertiser's chair. The cost of a result moves in an account that has changed nothing, and the person running it goes looking for what they did. Usually they did nothing. A category they have never heard of arrived in the auction with a budget, and the price of the person went up.

It is why the cost of reaching a Saudi customer climbs in November for a brand that sells nothing seasonal, and why an app with no connection to the entertainment season pays for it anyway. The people are the same. The demand for them is not.

The competitor slide still tells me what the category is saying. It does not tell me what the impression will cost, because the impression is priced by everybody, and everybody includes the game.

The competitor set in the deck is a comfort. The competitor set in the auction is whoever else wants the same minute of the same person, and most of them are not in your aisle.