Brands, agencies, and publishers each evaluate you against a different scorecard, and those scorecards moved when the cookie did. Real market research replaces the anecdotes your team repeats with decision-grade evidence about who buys, why, and what wins the RFP.
The Problem
You are guessing what three different buyers actually value
AdTech companies sell to brands, agencies, and publishers at the same time, and each one runs a different evaluation. Brands score you on performance and brand safety, agencies on margin and control, publishers on yield and revenue share. Most teams build product and messaging off a handful of founder conversations and a few loud customers, then assume that signal generalizes. When the assumptions are wrong, you ship features nobody asked for and lose deals on criteria you never knew were being measured.
The post-cookie reset broke your old market map
Signal loss, clean rooms, alternative IDs, and contextual targeting did not just change the product conversation – they changed which buyers hold the budget and how they decide. Research done before deprecation is now describing a market that no longer exists. If your view of the category is still framed around third-party data and last-click attribution, your roadmap and your pitch are anchored to a world buyers have already left. The gap shows up as longer sales cycles and a product that always feels one step behind the brief.
Analyst reports describe the category, not your wedge
The standard AdTech research diet is a Gartner quadrant, a couple of LUMA decks, and whatever a banker forwarded. Those describe the category at altitude, but they do not tell you why your specific DSP, SSP, or measurement product won the last ten deals and lost the next ten. Off-the-shelf reports cannot interview your won and lost prospects or pressure-test your differentiation against the four boxes you actually compete with. You end up with a market view that sounds smart in a board meeting and is useless in a pipeline review.
Pricing and packaging decisions are made on vibes
Most AdTech teams set CPM, take-rate, or platform pricing by copying a competitor or anchoring to what the loudest prospect would tolerate. Without research into willingness to pay across each buyer type and deal size, you leave margin on the table or price yourself out of RFPs you should win. Packaging compounds the problem when the same SKU is sold to a holding company and a single publisher who value entirely different things. Bad pricing research is expensive precisely because the error repeats on every deal you close.
How We Help
We start by mapping the decisions the research has to serve. In the first 30 days we sit with your team to write down the open questions that are actually blocking the roadmap, the pitch, and pricing – not a generic survey, but the three to five calls you cannot make confidently today. Then we map your real market: the LUMAscape adjacency you compete in, the buyer types holding budget, and where the category is moving on identity and addressability.
Strategy development turns open questions into a structured study. We design the interview guides and the segmentation across brands, agencies, and publishers, recruit won deals, lost deals, and never-engaged prospects, and build a competitive teardown grounded in how buyers actually shortlist. We pull in whatever quantitative signal exists – your CRM, win/loss data, usage telemetry – so the qualitative findings have weight behind them.
Execution is the fieldwork. We run the won/lost and prospect interviews ourselves, because the most useful insights come from the follow-up question an automated survey never asks. We test pricing and packaging hypotheses against real willingness to pay by buyer type, and we map the post-cookie buying criteria that now decide deals. We are looking for the patterns that repeat across interviews and the one or two surprises that change how you should go to market.
Measurement translates findings into instructions. We do not hand you a 60-page deck and disappear. We tell you which segment to lead with, which features actually move a decision, where to price, and what your pitch is getting wrong. We tie each recommendation to the evidence so your team can defend it to a skeptical board or a skeptical AE.
What makes this different is that we run it as operators who have carried a number, not as a research vendor optimizing for report length. We have sold into brands and agencies, so we know which questions surface real buying behavior and which produce polite noise. We stay embedded long enough to make sure the insights actually change the roadmap, the pricing, and the pitch – not just the appendix of your next board deck.
What we deliver
- Decision brief defining the open questions research must answer before roadmap or pricing changes
- Buyer segmentation and willingness-to-pay analysis across brands, agencies, and publishers
- Won/lost and prospect interview program with synthesized buying criteria
- Competitive teardown grounded in real shortlist behavior on your LUMAscape adjacency
- Prioritized recommendation set tied to evidence for product, pricing, and positioning
In AdTech, the most expensive research mistake is studying the category when you needed to study your buyers. A Gartner quadrant tells you the market exists. It never tells you why you lost the last ten RFPs – and that is the only question your roadmap can act on.
Our Methodology
Our market research build for AdTech runs as a 90-day sprint anchored to decisions, not to deliverable page count. Phase one is the decision brief: we sit with founders and GTM leadership to surface the three to five calls that are blocked on missing evidence, then map the real market and the buyer types that hold budget. We come out of phase one knowing exactly what the research has to prove and which segments to study.
Phase two is design and fieldwork. We build the segmentation and interview guides, recruit won deals, lost deals, and never-engaged prospects, and run the interviews ourselves so the follow-up questions get asked. In parallel we pull quantitative signal from your CRM and win/loss data and design pricing and packaging tests against real willingness to pay by buyer type. Every question maps back to a decision in the brief.
Phase three is synthesis and installation. We translate patterns into a prioritized recommendation set – which segment to lead with, what to build, where to price, what the pitch is missing – and tie each to evidence so it survives a board review. Unlike a research firm that ships a report and leaves, we stay embedded to make sure the findings change the roadmap and the GTM motion, and we help instrument the decision-drivers so the market view does not go stale.
How We Work
Initial engagements run 3 to 6 months because useful market research has to outlive the report and change real decisions. The first 30 days produce the decision brief and the market map, so we are studying the right questions before any fieldwork starts. Days 31 to 60 are design and interviews across brands, agencies, and publishers, plus the pricing and competitive work. Days 61 to 90 deliver synthesis, the prioritized recommendations, and the instrumentation handoff to your measurement function.
Our team includes a research lead who owns the study design and synthesis, an interviewer who runs the won/lost and prospect conversations, and a GTM operator who pressure-tests every finding against how it changes the pipeline. From your side we need founder or CEO time to set the decisions, sales leadership access for won/lost recruiting, and product and finance partners to validate roadmap and pricing implications. We handle recruiting, interviewing, analysis, and the recommendation set.
The cadence is a weekly working session during the build and a monthly review once findings are live. Weekly sessions move the study and the synthesis forward; monthly reviews track whether the recommendations are actually changing roadmap, pricing, and win rate. Most AdTech companies get directional findings within 45 days and a defensible, decision-ready insight set inside the 90-day sprint.
- A roadmap re-prioritized around features buyers actually score
- Pricing and packaging set on willingness to pay, not on a competitor's number
- Win/loss patterns that explain why specific RFPs are won and lost
- A current market view that survives the next shift in addressability
If your adtech company needs market research & insights leadership, we should talk.
Expand your marketing team output with our experts
Let us take a custom approach to your growth goals by assembling and leading the best-in-class marketing team to support your next stage.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a market research engagement cost for an AdTech company?
Most AdTech market research engagements run between $20K and $50K per month depending on how many buyer types you sell to and how much primary fieldwork the questions require. That is well under the cost of a full-time insights hire plus a syndicated research subscription, and it comes with operators who tie findings to decisions rather than to report length.
How long before we see results from a market research engagement?
You get a decision brief and market map within the first 30 days, which often resolves arguments your team has been having for months. Directional interview findings appear around day 45, and the full decision-ready insight set lands inside the 90-day sprint.
How does the market research team integrate with our product and sales staff?
We embed in your GTM and product motion rather than working as an outside firm. We run weekly working sessions with founders and sales leadership, use your team to recruit won and lost prospects, and review findings with product and finance so the recommendations are actionable on real roadmaps and price lists.
What makes Winston Francois different from a traditional market research agency?
Research agencies optimize for a polished report and then disappear, which is why most of that work ends up in an appendix nobody acts on. We treat research as a decision tool and stay embedded until the findings change the roadmap, the pricing, and the pitch.
How do you measure ROI from a market research engagement?
We measure ROI by the decisions the research changed: features re-prioritized, pricing adjusted to real willingness to pay, and win rate movement on the segments you choose to lead with. Each recommendation is tied to evidence so you can attribute downstream pipeline change back to a specific finding.
What type of AdTech company is the right fit for this service?
Series A through growth-stage AdTech companies between $5M and $100M ARR that are making roadmap, pricing, or positioning calls on anecdote rather than evidence. The strongest fit is a company whose market shifted under it during cookie deprecation and whose old assumptions no longer match how buyers decide.
