Drew Stein is the CEO and cofounder of Audigent.
Over the past several years, curation has become one of the biggest topics in advertising. Brands and agencies now spend 66% of the $150 billion+ open exchange programmatic media market in curated private marketplaces (PMPs), and major advertisers such as Coca-Cola and platforms like Google have openly committed to curation.
Amid all the growth, hype and press, many people are stretching the boundaries of what curation is, and many companies now claim they are “curators” or offer curated PMP products. Worse yet, a few incorrect definitions of “curation” have also emerged.
As a company widely recognized as a pioneer of curation, we believe it’s important to set the record straight on what curation is and what it isn’t.
What Curation Is
In programmatic advertising, curation refers to the strategic integration of data and inventory into a single, data-enriched package—commonly called a private marketplace. These curated packages are optimized to maximize value and performance for both advertisers and publishers.
The definition of a curator is a company that must provide the following three offerings:
Data
The type of data doesn’t matter. It can be first-party data, third-party data, contextual, predictive, modeled or any combination thereof. However, a curator must bring a unique set of data to the table to curate it against the inventory.
Addressable Inventory And Pipes
A curator must have inventory from publishers to package with its data. This means it has to have data integrations with supply-side platforms (SSPs) that allow it to do this. The more sophisticated those connections and pipes are, the more sophisticated those curators’ products will be, with real-time SSP integrations representing the gold standard.
Optimization
A curator must be capable of optimizing its packages of data plus inventory during a campaign. This also means it has to have data integrations with SSPs and internal platforms, which allow it to optimize in real time. The more sophisticated those platforms and connections are, the more sophisticated, more real time those curators’ optimizations will be.
All three of these factors are necessary for creating curated products and being a “curator.” If a solution misses any of the three criteria, then it is not practicing programmatic curation, full stop. Although there may be solutions that use curation tools from SSPs, the mere use of these tools does not make that company a “curator” or its products “curation.”
What Curation Isn’t
With curation, there are companies that do not meet the above qualifications that either call themselves curators or are lumped in under the banner.
Creating or managing a list of “acceptable” or “safe” URLs within a demand-side platform (DSP) is not curation. Labeling such practices as curation is a misrepresentation. Assembling inventory packages using allow or block lists in a DSP is neither new nor innovative. This approach has been around for years and doesn’t qualify as true curation, and claims to the contrary are often misleading.
Importantly, anyone who has not built a curation platform and/or does not have an ad operations team to optimize their curated PMPs is also not a curator. Curation is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” process. It was pioneered to optimize data against real-time performance signals, driving continuous improvement and value. Optimization is the core of curation. Without this capability, a company is not a true curator.
What Curation Can Do
Simply put, curation works by activating and optimizing data through the supply path directly packaging data and inventory into a single, enriched product. For over 15 years, data was solely activated in data marketplaces used by buy-side platforms with the help of identifiers like cookies. Today, curation has opened a more efficient, more privacy-safe world of activating data by using supply-side platforms.
It’s important to think about what curation can do when done correctly. Ultimately, three groups benefit through successful curation: brands/media agencies (buyers), publishers (sellers) and consumers.
For buyers, curated products represent an opportunity to lower costs (compared to buying DMP segments against open exchange), drive more performance out of their data with optimization, future-proof their media buying as real curation integrations are often cookieless and use log-level data to drive value-added insights and reporting.
For publishers, curated products offer an opportunity to make their inventory more addressable as well as increase pricing off open exchange flooring.
For consumers, curation offers a more privacy-friendly path where legacy identifiers with personally identifiable information (PII) are no longer needed.
What Curation Does Not Do
Real curation does not commoditize inventory. On the contrary, it should only drive incremental revenue for publishers. Publishers have full control over their inventory pricing through their SSP. These SSPs have developed interfaces for publishers that allow them to set the pricing floors as well as opt in and opt out of curated deals. Using these tools is the key to leveraging curation the way it was designed for publishers and assures that they are in the driver’s seat.
Curating The Future
Curation offers a practical approach to delivering value for both ad buyers and sellers. It also serves as an effective method for adapting media buying strategies to address challenges like signal loss and decreasing inventory addressability in the evolving advertising landscape.
With real-time pipes and data connections that no longer rely on hosting old-school matching tables and data distribution, curation opens the door to new, more reliable and performant ways to activate audience data and provide the fuel brands and media agencies need to drive outcomes and that publishers need to future-proof monetization.
As curation has become a key strategy for activating data, my best advice to brands and media agencies pursuing a curation strategy is:
1. Make sure the curator you are working with checks all three boxes: unique data sets, extensive supply pipes and robust optimization capabilities.
2. Track performance and value. Real curation should save you money and drive strong media performance.
3. Research new partners. Too many people have jumped on this bandwagon but don’t have real value to offer.
The curation space is expanding based on its merits, and growth is driven by meaningful innovation that has seen real improvements in efficacy and privacy.
As with any fast-moving category, there are leaders, followers and others. For those who want to benefit from curation, every partner and client should know how to segment all three groups to unlock the value of curation while steering clear of those who talk about curation but fail to deliver on it.
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