What is ad tech curation?

After several years of fits and starts, curation in ad tech is finally having its moment in the spotlight. 

But here’s the catch: Google’s take on curation won’t necessarily look the same as anyone else’s. The truth is it can often mean different things to different companies — depending on what they’re trying to sell.

WTF is curation?

It’s a term used to describe how ad tech vendors curate audience and programmatic supply chain data against ad inventory to sell overlooked, but valuable, ad impressions. Done right, it’s a win-win: more efficient reach for advertisers and a revenue bump for publishers.

Still confused?

Picture curation as aggregating select supply from the vast, open programmatic market, where prices are determined in real-time auctions, along three lines: audience data, contextual data and supply chain integrity (no resellers, no made-for-arbitrage inventory, etc.). Curation combines this data intelligently with inventory.

Wait, isn’t this just targeting?

Not exactly. Marketers have long used demand-side platforms (DSPs) to target audiences, but that’s just refined targeting. Curation ups the ante by analyzing the entire bidstream — the real-time exchange of data around the trading of ads. DSPs only capture a fragment of this data since analyzing every impression put up for sale is cost-prohibitive. Supply-side platforms, however, hear it all.

So, is this sell-side targeting?

Correct. Curation, at least as it is currently framed in the industry, essentially functions as sell-side targeting — a twist, since programmatic targeting has traditionally been the DSP’s domain.

But if targeting is within the SSP, why would you need a…

Hold that thought. We’ll get there.

How does curation work?

Think of curation as a way of selling ads that sits between open auction and direct publisher deals. It bundles ad impressions tied to a specific deal ID — essentially a curated package not too dissimilar to how direct deals are sold. But unlike those, curated impressions lack preferential access and are still sold in the open auction, meaning no marketer gets special treatment.

Confused again?

While curation and direct deals are related, curation is broader. It still lets publishers control which impressions are sold but to multiple eager buyers via the open auction.

Who makes this happen?

Companies like Audigent, Multilocal and Infolinks put the three pillars of curation (audience, contextual and supply chain integrity) into practice by creating those auction packages. These bundles of impressions, tied to deal IDs, for a curated supply get sold on the open market.

“In their worst form, curators add another supply chain fee for simply loading a site list into an SSP,” said Chris Kane, president of programmatic consultancy Jounce Media. “But in their best form, curators make run-time evaluations of audience, content and supply chain signals in novel ways that DSPs do not currently support.”

Can’t SSPs do this themselves?

Technically, yes, especially in connected TV. But here’s the rub: companies like Audigent and Infolinks specialize in curation. SSPs, meanwhile, focus on managing programmatic auctions and delivering the ad once the auction for it has been won by an advertiser. In other words, they’re not technically aligned or business primed to do curation — whereas specialists excel at crafting bespoke packages, either around their own signals (for example, attention metrics or alternative identifiers) or by aggregating signals from publishers, SSPs and other data sources via their own partnerships.

How do curators know what advertisers want?

Through their deals curators have a front-row view of which ads perform well and use that intel to shape future packages to whet advertiser interest. But it’s not always a guessing game. Sometimes, they collaborate directly with advertisers to build those curated auction packages. Once those ads are in play, these specialists overlook the auction, helping advertisers fine-tune their ad spending depending on how performative those ads are.

“We co-locate in the same data centers as our SSP partners so that we can enrich the bid in lightning fast time before it goes to the DSP — that’s real curation,” said Drew Stein, CEO and co-founder of Audigent, a curation specialist. “The same goes for data infrastructure. You need it to be able to curate the data against ad inventory.”

Why use a DSP if targeting like this can be done on the sell-side?

While curation could disrupt the DSP mode, for now, it channels more ad dollars to them by capturing demand they’d otherwise miss. Long-term, however, the shift could affect DSP’s role in targeting, potentially relegating them to workflow tools if more targeting moves sell-side.

How might this happen?

Let’s be clear: the likelihood of DSPs being sidelined by sell-side targeting is as slim as it is unlikely. DSPs remain unrivaled at buying ad impressions efficiently, and even if more of the logic to make those buys shifts elsewhere, they’ll still control a hefty chunk of ad spend. However, if DSPs were to lose out to curation it would likely be because their ability to secure the most efficient buys for their advertisers has been chipped away. Two factors would drive this: the sell-side aggregating more signals to help advertisers make smarter buys, and DSPs struggling to keep — particularly with the loss of third-party cookies which are central to how they operate.

It’s complicated. On one hand, curation enables sharper targeting which can increase the spend flowing through a DSP. On the other hand, it’s costly, requiring deep data analysis of signals across the bidstream — something DSPs have shied away from. Outsourcing this work is an option, but it comes with its own consequences. It could unintentionally speed up the shift away from DSP-centric targeting, particularly as third-party cookies phase out.

Why the recent hype around curation?

Where there’s money, there’s movement. More advertisers want to responsibly and effectively reach audiences in the open market. Consider the recent signs: Magnite’s revenue from curating publisher audiences has grown over 100% this year compared to last, according to CEO Michael Barrett earlier this month. Just weeks earlier, Coca-Cola’s head of programmatic said that curation would be a key focus for its own programmatic advertising moving forward.

“While curation itself isn’t new, its resurgence is driven by advertisers and agencies now putting significant investment behind it, making it a high-stakes trend,” said Milly Putley, associate director of marketing at web 3.0 ad exchange Alkimi. “This shift highlights the need for deeper, more meaningful approaches to ad curation.”

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