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Welcome to the TechMachaw digest. Once a week you will get what actually changed in digital marketing, advertising and AI, and what it means for the budget or the audience you are responsible for. No fluff, no press releases.
Your free bonus: the Media Planning Playbook
A 7-page PDF written for people who have to justify a media budget to someone else. It is free, there is nothing else to sign up for, and the download link is below.
What is inside
- The 2026 ad spend picture. Where money is actually going by channel, with a donut chart showing the split and a bar chart showing which channels are growing.
- A plain English channel glossary. What retail media, connected TV, programmatic and the rest actually are, written so you can explain them to someone who does not work in media.
- The pre-approval checklist. The questions senior stakeholders ask before signing off a plan: objective, audience definition, reach and frequency logic, measurement approach and what happens if it underperforms.
- A worked budget split showing how an objective translates into a channel mix, rather than a mix picked first and justified later.
What to do next
The playbook covers the thinking. These free tools do the arithmetic, all of them running in your browser with no sign-up:
- Reach and frequency calculator, for working out how far a budget actually stretches and how often it hits the same person.
- UTM campaign builder, so your tracking is consistent before the campaign goes live rather than patched afterwards.
- GEO readiness score, for checking whether your content is set up to be cited by AI search.
- The 174-term media planning glossary, for anything in the playbook you want defined properly.
If media planning is not your thing, the digest still covers AI tools, the creator economy and platform changes, so it is worth staying subscribed either way.
Want to go deeper first? Read the full media planning guide or how to build a digital media plan step by step.
Download not working, or the email did not arrive? Tell us on the contact page and it will be sorted.