Lucía Vega

Lucía joined Mediasmart in early 2018, the year the agency was acquired by Affle and the programmatic side started absorbing inventory it didn't fully understand. Her first job was inventory QA for Spanish iGaming — pre-DGOJ-tightening, when the licensing landscape still let you launch a campaign on a Tuesday and audit the deck on a Friday. Within a year she was running the LATAM Spanish-language book because no one else at the agency could explain to a Mexican advertiser why their "Spain campaign" was bidding against itself in Galicia.

What she learned over the next five years isn't in any of Mediasmart's case studies. It's in the gap between what a buyer in Madrid assumes about "the LATAM market" and what actually happens to a popunder campaign when it lands in Lima at 11pm versus Buenos Aires at 11pm versus a Spanish-speaking corner of Miami at 11pm. Four time zones, three regulatory regimes, two dialect families, one auction. The math nobody publishes is how much CPM a brand loses by treating those four buyers as one audience.

She left in January 2024 after a single conversation with a colleague — described in her stories file — that made staying impossible. The independent practice started as audit-only work for ex-clients and is now a mix of buying-side audits, network selection, and the writing you're reading. She still buys popunder for friends' offers when they ask, mostly because Madrid's affiliate scene is small enough that "friends' offers" and "market intelligence" are the same data set.