What a media buyer does
A media buyer runs the ad accounts. On paid social that means building campaigns in Meta, TikTok, and Google, setting budgets and bids, choosing audiences and placements, and watching cost per result every day. When something works they scale it; when something dies they cut it.
The role used to be about negotiating placements with publishers. On modern platforms the auction does that, so the buyer's judgment now goes into structure (how many campaigns, how to split budget), testing (what to launch next), and reading the numbers well enough to explain them to a founder or client.
What media buyers need from creators
Media buyers eat creative. A healthy paid social account might need a few new ads every week, and most of that volume on DTC accounts is UGC. So the buyer's request to creators is simple: more variations, faster, in the right specs. Vertical 9:16, safe zones respected, hook in the first two seconds, captions burned in or delivered separately.
They also care about usage rights because an ad that wins can run for months. Example Slack message from a buyer to a creator manager: "The kitchen demo from Maya is our top ad at a 2.1 ROAS. Her rights end on the 30th. Can we extend for 90 days and get two more hooks on the same body?"
How media buyers judge UGC
Buyers judge a video by what it does in the auction, not by how it looks. The metrics that matter are thumb-stop or hook rate, hold rate, click-through, and cost per purchase. A slightly messy phone video that stops the scroll beats a polished one that doesn't.
Good buyers work with a creative strategist to close the loop: results from the account feed the next brief, and the next brief feeds the next creator batch. When a creator's face or style consistently wins, they'll ask to source more creators like that one, which is where creator search comes in.
How it's used
The media buyer needs four fresh UGC videos by Friday because the current ads are fatiguing.
Ask the media buyer which hook is winning before we brief the next creator batch.