Kacper Nowak

Kacper joined Cherry Media in 2017 as a junior buying-side analyst on the iGaming desk, six months after the Polish gambling law amendment closed the public-network market to most foreign operators and reshaped the country's traffic economics overnight. The job was meant to be running campaign briefs through the agency's planning tool. Within a year he was the only person in the Warsaw office who could explain to a Maltese operator why their "Polish iGaming campaign" was bidding against itself in Kraków, and why the conversion rate in Wrocław was triple the rate in Łódź even when the creative and the offer were identical.

What he learned over the next four years isn't in any deck Cherry Media would let him publish. It's in the gap between the Polish ad market as a Berlin agency describes it ("EU-tier, English-language ready, low CPM") and the Polish ad market as a Warsaw operator actually buys it (regional CPM splits, Polish-specific payment-method conversion gaps, the very specific kind of fraud you only see when an offer pays in złoty). Between 2018 and 2021 he audited 38 Polish campaigns for international advertisers; 31 of them were misallocating budget by region and 9 of them were paying for traffic that wasn't converting on a payment-method assumption that didn't hold.

He left Cherry Media in spring 2021 to start NetworkLab — at the time a single LinkedIn post asking whether Polish operators wanted real auditing, and a $400 server. The agency is now six people in a shared Mokotów office, runs about €380K of monthly buying-side spend, and operates a small publisher-network bridge for offers that want Polish reach without paying tier-1 network margins. He still writes the post-mortems himself. He still reviews every new offer the team takes on, mostly because the agency has lost money exactly once on a campaign he didn't personally screen and he learned the lesson properly.