Great points lifted and concepts summarised from the article, Henrik!

Having a tight
audience targeting is also especially important when your'e simply optimising for reach on a
limited budget. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario where you have a line in your proposal
with a Reach objective:
Campaign line: RM 2,000
Estimated CPM: RM 10
Est. Avg. Frequency: 2x / week
Duration: 1 week
Based on the above numbers, you’ll be able to reach just 100,000 people. And since no
action is required by the audience, the platform doesn’t rely on any user action to ‘optimise’
the serving to the most relevant people. Hence, to the platform any 100,000 people will do.
Therefore, you have to tighten the audience targeting parameters from the get-go to make
sure the ads are served to the people that matter the absolute most to you. Hence, if your
target audience size is in the millions, you’re probably going to hit and miss a lot - and
you’ve likely wasted a majority of the line budget.
Moreover, the creative, ad type and placements are equally important because you need to
make sure you have a good chance of capturing the attention of the audience when the ad
gets served (i.e. the ad’s probability of being viewed and seen!). Most people are exposed to
a myriad of ads a day thus it's very easy to miss your ad (especially if it's served on FB's
Audience Network).

A good creative trumps everything else. No amount of planning,

research, targeting, or audiences will have as big of an impact as your
creative.

Use budget consistent with audience size

"...the easiest factors to measure are impressions, reach, likes, follows, shares, clicks and
open rates. These can be measured in real time, are extremely cheap to find out and can be
known precisely. But, generally speaking, these things are entirely pointless. They literally
mean nothing and represent vague proxies for success. We can build long-term models
between these statistics and commercial success, but they are still rather silly metrics.
The love of these easy, fast, changeable metrics has driven brand budgets online, which
makes sense considering how we spend our time, but it has had the baffling effect of
delivering performance-based, rather than brand-building, advertising."
"The best advertising will always be the sum total of informed emotive decisions; that is,
data to inform, common sense, creativity and, perhaps, just a hunch. No matter what you
read about the power of digital, that combination will never die. "
"I’ve learnt that big budgets and unlimited funds are not a prerequisite to a successful
campaign. It’s not the amount of media you buy, and not the amount of ads you have, but
instead the idea."

Recognise the difference between viewability and attention.

"...if we are trying to reach someone for the first time, the shorter the better. If we are
retargeting, we can play a 15 or a 30. Part of the theory there is that if somebody hasn’t
heard of you, they are not going to give you the time of day.”

finer geographic and behavioral targeting instead of interest is probably more powerful
tactics.

This is why knowing the client's customer composition is critical (when choosing who to
target) in order to make sure we get quality leads, not quantity.

Media objective is often not the same as the Marketing objective.

Companies should be worried about the lasting impact of "buying cheap customers." How
likely are these customers to buy another product, or hang around for a few years?
Sometimes it pays to invest in "good" customers. "Good" customers might cost more to
acquire, but they'll likely be more profitable as well.

Benchmark attention, not reach.