What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025
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Not only technical errors or failures can be annoying at work. Times change, and with them the values, expectations and internal problems of the sphere. Let’s evaluate the biggest “freaks” that in reality annoy arbitration experts.

When a manager…

Yaroslava, CBDO Wild Wild Leads, says that the TOP-3 “freaking moments” include these:

When managers come with questions “who are you, what kind of traffic do you have, pour it on us”, and they themselves have NDAs and cannot tell about themselves normally.
Have you ever seen an “epic scene” when a manager sends statistics on the spilled traffic, and it seems that he himself does not understand anything about it? Well, it is definitely not cool.
When the quality of traffic is at its best, and you are not given a daily cap.

It would seem that it is all about different things, but when you are already so tired, such moments are definitely not happy. Do you agree?

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

The budget went down the drain?

Pan Volier, Head of FB SPT, honestly shares the moments that I would like to avoid in my work:

There are cases when money goes down the drain without analyzing the indicators.
When buyers work until 5 am, and the next morning they are “cooked”.
And you can’t avoid this bright pain — endless problems with Facebook and their inconvenient, error-filled updates.

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

These are the realities — absurd reasons really affect the results of campaigns.

Conversions are falling, let’s hold on

Ivan Protsenko, RnD Product Manager PDLP talks about a classic misunderstanding: in the case of a drop in conversions on a product, managers are told that the problem is in traffic and analytics are usually… simply not provided. This is so bad!

It’s even worse when a partner imposes “squeezed” traffic like super-hot PPC, you just don’t know how to work with it.

Beginners, according to Ivan, sometimes naively think that they “fell into the dark” and it’s enough to just start somehow, rather than learn and plow.

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

We think that all these points are important to take into account and we hope that there will be fewer of them!

A buyer without initiative is…

EZ, Head of Media Buying FRBS Team looks into the problem clearly:

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

“The lack of initiative is annoying. You give a setup, creative, a preview – everything is ready, work! And the buyer doesn’t even follow the metrics”.
Working exclusively according to a checklist, without your own intelligence and understanding is a bad idea, but, unfortunately, it often happens.
And the naive lie: “Traffic is still catching up”, when in fact it is obvious that the launch is a complete fiasco, is also annoying.

You don’t need to look in the mirror and look for excuses, sometimes the problem is really in you, which you need to fix for your own growth.

Arbitrage is not a hobby

VLAD, Head of Rockit media buying, talks about the most painful thing:

Low competence of specialists in the field: insufficient level of expertise in traffic sources.
When until now they perceive arbitration “as something where you can score points”.
He looks with disrespect at the lack of systematicity and independence: when at the interview they talked about a lot of experience, but in fact we have to tell what to do.
Focus on short-term profit and neglect of quality shortens the path to failure.

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

From all this, we can conclude that critical thinking — must have!

Sadness from Oleg Kupets

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

Oleg Kupets, owner of KuTeam, KuPartners shared the following thoughts:

“It’s maddening when they lie about their achievements at an interview, and at the slightest question they collapse. Starting a partnership with lies is a bad strategy.”

He also gets annoyed when a company changes KPIs without notice.

And, of course, he is concerned about the problem with payments when they drag on for months.

Delays in payments are definitely a red flag.

Star sickness and template answers

Dmytro, Head of Buying at Fellows Team, cites typical situations that are not OK:

“When a buyer/team leader comes to you and says: ‘My friends are pouring connections in ROI 200–300, let’s drop everything and do the same’.”
“Buyers who have poured something resembling profit for the first time in their lives and immediately catch star sickness.”
The icing on the cake of irritation is the template answers of advertisers to questions about payments: “Everything is stable on other streams + cropped screen.” After which you involuntarily want to answer: “Stable bad?”.

What's Really Annoying About Arbitration and Media Buying in 2025

Reflection and perspective

These stories are not just a list of problems, but concrete signals to the industry about the need for change. Communication, competence and transparency are the three pillars on which success rests. Learn and be professional first and foremost for yourself, the team and the result.

Share your thoughts!

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