Unlocking the Power of Ad Tech Curation: What You Need to Know

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.

What is Curation?

Curation is 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.

Understanding Curation

Imagine curation as aggregating select supply from the vast, open programmatic market, with prices 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.

Is 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 (SSPs), however, hear it all.

Sell-Side Targeting

Curation, 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.

How Does Curation Work?

Curation is 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 from how direct deals are sold. Unlike direct deals, curated impressions are sold in the open auction, meaning no marketer gets special treatment.

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, get sold on the open market.

The Role of SSPs

Technically, SSPs could do this themselves, especially in connected TV, but they focus on managing programmatic auctions and delivering ads once the auction has been won. Companies specializing in curation excel at crafting bespoke packages around their own signals or aggregating signals from publishers and other data sources.

Advertiser Insights

Curators know what advertisers want through their deals and by collaborating directly with advertisers to build curated auction packages. They help advertisers fine-tune their ad spending based on ad performance.

The Future of DSPs

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

The Hype Around Curation

The recent hype around curation is driven by advertisers wanting to reach audiences effectively in the open market. Magnite’s revenue from curating publisher audiences has grown over 100% this year, highlighting the need for deeper, more meaningful approaches to ad curation.