Alternatives to Meta Ads
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.
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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. If you are still deciding where to start, free options included, see where to advertise your business.
| Channel | What it is for | How publishers price it |
|---|---|---|
| Connected TV | Being seen on a television screen, household by household, with the credibility that carries | Usually CPM |
| Digital screens (DOOH) | Streets, malls, gyms and venues, where nobody is scrolling past | CPM or fixed period |
| Billboards and street furniture | Presence in a specific city or neighbourhood | Usually fixed, per week or month |
| Metro and transit | Captive attention during a commute | Usually fixed period |
| Cinema | Full attention, big screen, no skip button | Fixed period |
| Press, radio and podcast | Editorial credibility, and host-read spots that sound like a recommendation | Fixed, 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 Ads | Publicit | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the ad appears | Facebook and Instagram feeds, Reels, Stories, Audience Network | CTV, billboards, digital screens, metro, cinema, press, radio, in-app |
| How you get a placement | An auction decides, continuously | You pick each space by hand and request it |
| Who approves it | Automated policy review | Nobody: an automatic check against the format of the space |
| Price you see | An auction result after the fact | The publisher's own price, before you book |
| What you pay on top | Nothing separate, the margin is inside the auction | A stated 10% platform fee, plus VAT |
| Optimisation | Algorithmic, and very good at it | None. You are choosing placements, not training a model |
| Attribution | Click and conversion tracking in one system | Impressions per space, plus QR scans for offline placements |
| Time to live | Minutes | Minutes: no approval queue |
| Creative you need | Feed-native video and images | A 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 at the rate that corresponds to where your business is registered (21% in Spain).
- 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 while you build the campaign: the card is charged once, when you launch it.
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 infrastructure by price.
You see the price before you buy. Each publisher lists a space at their own price, and that price is on the listing, so you know what a placement costs before you commit to it instead of discovering it afterwards. Nobody reviews your campaign or your creative by hand, and nothing is optimised against you.
You get impressions and spend for each space while the campaign runs, measured by the exchange on programmatic inventory and labelled as reported or estimated everywhere else. For offline placements a campaign can carry a QR code tracked by Publicit, with scans by country, region and device. 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.
Sources
How the Meta auction works comes from Meta's own documentation; Publicit's prices come from its pricing page.
- Meta Business Help Center: About ad auctions (accessed 5 October 2026)
- Publicit pricing: publisher price plus a 10% fee plus VAT (updated 5 October 2026)
See the alternatives for yourself
Signing up is free and browsing the infrastructure costs nothing. Search by city, filter by price, and see which televisions, screens and panels are actually available before deciding anything.
Publicit Global SLU, Barcelona. Fees stated as of September 2026.