Alternatives to Meta Ads

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Most alternatives to Meta Ads are not other feeds. They are the channels Meta cannot sell you: Connected TV, billboards, digital screens, metro and transit, cinema, press and radio. Publicit is a self-service platform for exactly those, bookable from one dashboard at the prices publishers set themselves. It reaches the people your feed ads never do, and leaves direct response to Meta, which is what Meta is for.

What Meta Ads is genuinely good at

Starting with this matters, because a comparison that pretends Meta is bad is not a comparison, it is a sales pitch.

  • Speed of iteration. You can launch, read results and change the creative the same afternoon.
  • Direct response. Click to a product page, add to cart, purchase, all attributable in one system.
  • Retargeting. Reaching people who already visited your site or engaged with your brand is something a billboard cannot do.
  • Small budgets. The auction lets you spend very little and still learn something.
  • Catalogue selling. If you have hundreds of SKUs, dynamic product ads do work no manual channel can match.

If those are your requirements, Meta is not a problem to be solved. Keep it.

Where Meta Ads runs out

Three limits, and none of them are fixed by a better creative:

  • It is one context: a feed. Your ad competes for attention with a friend's photo and a video someone actually chose to watch. A spot on a television, a panel in a metro station or a screen in a gym is not competing with anything on that surface.
  • Everyone is in the same auction. Your competitors bid on the same audiences, so the price of attention rises with demand, and being outbid is a permanent condition rather than a fixable mistake.
  • It cannot make you look established. There is a category of trust that comes from being seen on television, or on a billboard in your own city, that no amount of feed impressions produces. This is the reason companies still buy those channels.

The channels Meta cannot sell you

These are the actual alternatives, and Publicit sells all of them from one dashboard and one budget:

ChannelWhat it is forHow publishers price it
Connected TVBeing seen on a television screen, household by household, with the credibility that carriesUsually CPM
Digital screens (DOOH)Streets, malls, gyms and venues, where nobody is scrolling pastCPM or fixed period
Billboards and street furniturePresence in a specific city or neighbourhoodUsually fixed, per week or month
Metro and transitCaptive attention during a commuteUsually fixed period
CinemaFull attention, big screen, no skip buttonFixed period
Press, radio and podcastEditorial credibility, and host-read spots that sound like a recommendationFixed, or per insertion

Note what is not in that list: another social feed. If your problem is that Meta is expensive, a different feed is the same problem with a different logo.

Meta Ads and Publicit, side by side

 Meta AdsPublicit
Where the ad appearsFacebook and Instagram feeds, Reels, Stories, Audience NetworkCTV, billboards, digital screens, metro, cinema, press, radio, in-app
How you get a placementAn auction decides, continuouslyYou pick each space by hand and request it
Who approves itAutomated policy reviewThe publisher who owns the space, individually
Price you seeAn auction result after the factThe publisher's own price, before you book
What you pay on topNothing separate, the margin is inside the auctionA stated 10% platform fee, plus VAT
OptimisationAlgorithmic, and very good at itNone. You are choosing placements, not training a model
AttributionClick and conversion tracking in one systemImpressions and delivery evidence per space
Time to liveMinutesPublishers usually respond within 48 hours
Creative you needFeed-native video and imagesA spot, or artwork sized for the format

Running both at once

Yes, and it is the normal case. The pattern that makes sense: Meta and Google keep doing the direct response work, and a CTV or outdoor campaign runs in the same city or region to make the brand familiar before the click-through ever happens. On Publicit that second half is one campaign with one budget, even when it spans a television, a metro panel and a digital screen.

You supply the creative in both cases. Publicit sells and manages media, not production.

What it costs compared to Meta

The two are not priced the same way, so a straight CPM comparison is misleading. What can be stated exactly is the Publicit side, because there is no auction hiding it:

  • You pay the publisher's own price for each space, visible before you request it.
  • Publicit adds a 10% platform fee, and VAT applies on the combined base: 21% in Spain and the rest of the EU, 0% outside the EU.
  • The publisher receives the full media budget. The fee is Publicit's margin and never comes out of the publisher's side.
  • Nothing is charged until a publisher has agreed to a space, and the money sits in escrow until delivery is evidenced.

Full breakdown with a worked example on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

For awareness, the real alternatives are the channels Meta does not sell: Connected TV, digital screens, billboards, metro and cinema, which Publicit sells self-service from one dashboard. If what Meta was doing for you is driving direct sales, the closest alternative is Google Ads, because it also captures intent and attributes conversions.

Publicit does the part Meta cannot: television, billboards, digital screens, metro, cinema, press and radio, bought yourself at publisher prices. It does not do retargeting, dynamic product ads or algorithmic optimisation, so it works alongside Meta rather than instead of it.

Publicit's minimum is a 500 total budget and a 50 daily budget per campaign: above that you pay per space rather than per period, so the floor is the spaces you choose. Whether a specific space fits your budget is visible before you request it, and you can filter the marketplace by price.

There is no auction. Each publisher lists a space at their own price and you request it at that price. A human at the publisher then accepts, declines or asks for a revision, based on your objective, targeting, creative and fit with their audience. You are not outbid, and you are not optimised against.

You get impressions and spend for each space while the campaign runs, and the publisher submits evidence of delivery afterwards, which is reviewed before they are paid. What these placements do not give you is click-level attribution to a purchase, because most of them have no click.

For Connected TV, yes: you supply the creative. For outdoor, digital screens, metro and press you supply artwork sized for the format. Publicit does not do production, which is one of the things a media agency still does better.

See the alternatives for yourself

Signing up is free and browsing the marketplace costs nothing. Search by city, filter by price, and see which televisions, screens and panels are actually available before deciding anything.

Publicit Global S.L., Barcelona. Fees stated as of September 2026.