American Career College doubles qualified reach per dollar with agentic media buying
At a glance
THE EPIC WIN
American Career College now reaches 2x as many qualified prospective students for every dollar spent, after Level Agency put an emerging agentic media buying platform to a live, head-to-head test: PubMatic, an agentic media platform, against its existing programmatic setup. As one of the first independent agencies to test agentic media buying this way, Level gave ACC an early-mover edge on the open internet.
THE CHALLENGE
American Career College (ACC) fills seats every single month. Its core certificate and diploma programs, including medical assisting, dental assisting, and pharmacy tech, start on a rolling monthly basis with effectively unlimited capacity, which means the enrollment engine can never idle. ACC operates three campuses in the Los Angeles DMA: Los Angeles, Ontario, and Orange County, each with its own demographics and its own per-program, per-month targets. Its best prospective students cluster in small geographic pockets inside one of the largest and most expensive media markets in the country.
That combination makes efficiency existential. Enrollment targets reset every month, so a soft month can’t be recovered later. Next month’s starts are already waiting, with their own targets to hit. Every dollar spent on reaching the wrong ZIP code or the wrong person comes out of next month’s class.
THE ANALYSIS
Level structured the evaluation as a live, head-to-head test: an agentic media buying platform running simultaneously against ACC’s existing programmatic setup, with identical budgets and objectives, judged against ACC’s own reporting so the results would decide, independent of either vendor’s claims.
The evaluation focused on the three things an agentic, supply-side approach could change for a client like ACC:
On a traditional demand-side platform path, budget passes through the DSP, the ad exchange, and other intermediary fees before reaching the publishers that own the audience. Buying closer to the source, through a supply-side platform, promised to put more of ACC’s budget into working media while compressing the time it took to launch.
THE INSIGHT
The real advantage of agentic media buying was control.
The strategic core of the work stayed with Level’s team: developing the media plan that identifies the audiences and channels most likely to reach ACC’s students. That plan gave the platform its context, and the platform used it to surface audience recommendations in moments rather than hours of manual targeting work.
Combined with lower fees and a faster launch, that turned three long-standing fixed constraints, audience targeting, intermediary fees, and setup time, into variables the team could actually move. The team’s time shifted from searching for and editing targeting to refining and testing what works, and more of ACC’s budget and Level’s attention went to the work that actually drives enrollment.
THE STRATEGY
Level ran the test to see what an agentic approach could do in the hands of an experienced team:
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Developed the media plan, then let the platform build from it.
The strategic work came first: Level's team identified the audiences and channels most likely to reach ACC's prospective students and set the goals the buy had to hit. That plan gave the platform its context, and it returned audience and sourcing recommendations matched to those goals, with the estimated fee attached. Level refined the recommendations against what ACC actually needed and applied them once the team was aligned.
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Put more budget into working media.
Buying supplier to publisher through the supply-side platform meant significantly lower platform fees than a traditional DSP, so a larger share of ACC's spend reached real inventory.
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Turned setup time into an advantage.
A launch that would normally take hours dropped to minutes, which let Level stand up a time-sensitive campus open house campaign on the open internet, a channel that had never been fast enough to use for those moments before.
Throughout, Level’s team is what made the speed pay off: developing the media plan the platform learned from, refining its recommendations against ACC’s goals, and deciding where the new speed could open doors the client had never been able to walk through.
"Agentic made speed a variable we could finally control. When setup stops eating hours or days, our team can shift from managing the button-pressing to managing the strategy. It's what let us stand up a same-week campaign that wasn't viable before, and it gets us more time-sensitive work into market going forward."
THE RESULTS
Running simultaneously against ACC’s existing setup over May and June 2026, the agentic approach outperformed on the metrics that mattered. Results below are interim from a still-live test and are reported against ACC’s own tracking, where delivery metrics are in range with the platform’s reporting.
- Roughly 53% more efficient CPMs on premium streaming inventory, reflecting that same shorter supply path.
- A 54% higher video completion rate, a reflection of the premium OTT inventory the supply-side platform accesses directly.
- Clean, diverse delivery. The campaign ran across 1,755 unique publisher placements with no single source exceeding 13% of impressions, an inventory diversity that acted as a natural frequency cap, with zero brand-unsafe placements.
- Speed as a capability. Setup dropped from the typical 3 to 5 hours to roughly 30 minutes, which is what made the same-week open house activation possible in the first place.
Conversion outcomes are being finalized as measurement is reconciled across platforms and will follow in a subsequent update.
For ACC, the test showed that when setup time and media costs shrink, more of the budget and more of the team’s expertise move toward what actually drives enrollment. The test continues, with ACC and Level expanding it.
"We're always looking for ways to reach students more efficiently, and this test delivered. Running agentic media with PubMatic through Level got us better results than our existing approach, at a lower cost. It's a good example of how Level tests new tools quickly and brings us the ones that actually move the numbers."
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