Basics · also called brand, buyer, marketer
Advertiser
An advertiser is the company, organisation or person that pays to place ads in order to sell products, build a brand, recruit, or spread a message.
The advertiser is where the money in advertising starts. It can be a global brand, a local restaurant, an app developer, a political campaign or a charity. Advertisers are also called the "demand side" because they create demand for ad space.
Large advertisers usually work through an agency, often part of a holding company, which plans and buys media on their behalf, sometimes via an in-house trading desk. They use a DSP for programmatic buying, an advertiser ad server to host and track creatives, and measurement partners for attribution, ad verification and incrementality. Smaller advertisers often go straight to self-serve platform tools such as Google Ads, Meta or Amazon Ads.
Advertisers care about outcomes (conversions, ROAS, reach, brand lift) and about where their ads run (brand safety). They are the party most exposed to ad fraud, because they pay for impressions and clicks whether or not a human saw them. Trade bodies such as the ANA in the US and the WFA globally represent their interests.
Think of it like this
The advertiser is the customer at the market who arrives with the cash; everyone else in the chain, from brokers to stall owners, is competing for a share of that purse.
An example
A Brazilian beverage company sets a quarterly budget of R$10 million, split between TV, paid social, programmatic video and retail media, and hires an agency to execute it.
Related terms
Publisher
A publisher is any owner of content or a digital property, such as a website, app, streaming service, podcast or screen network, that earns money by selling ad space to advertisers.
Agency
An agency is a company that plans, buys, creates or manages advertising on behalf of advertisers, in exchange for fees, commissions or a margin on the media it buys.
DSP (demand-side platform)
A DSP (demand-side platform) is software that advertisers and agencies use to buy ad impressions automatically across many exchanges and publishers, deciding which impressions to bid on and how much.
Campaign
A campaign is an organised set of ads with a shared goal, budget, audience and time period, run across one or more channels and measured against defined KPIs.
ANA (Association of National Advertisers)
The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) is the main US trade association for advertisers and marketers, founded in 1910, known for research on media transparency and programmatic waste.