by Eric Picard
As programmatic advertising continues to evolve, the concept of curation has become a critical focus. My article from a few years ago, The Fifth Wave of ad tech highlighted the rise of “privileged programmatic”, but today’s discussions center around the nuanced roles of curation. To truly understand its implications, we need to dig into the distinctions between manual and smart curation, and clarify how these approaches differ from traditional ad networks and the proto-curation methods established by programmatic buyers using PMPs.
Ad Networks: The Initial Curators
In the early days of programmatic advertising, ad networks acted as intermediaries, facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers. However, their model was fundamentally flawed. By exploiting market inefficiencies, ad networks engaged in arbitrage—buying low and selling high—without significantly enhancing transactional value. This approach, while initially convenient, soon revealed its limitations as advertisers grew wary of inflated costs and minimal value addition.The recognition of ad networks’ inefficiencies spurred a shift towards more transparent and efficient transaction models. Although some ad networks persist, their model is increasingly viewed as outdated and incompatible with the demands of a sophisticated programmatic ecosystem.
Proto-Curation: Traders using PMPs
For over a decade, advanced programmatic buyers have employed a strategy that could be termed proto-curation. This involves negotiating with publishers for privileged access to inventory, resulting in the manual creation and management of a vast array of Private Marketplace (PMP) deals within DSPs. These PMPs offer buyers curated inventory aligned with their specific needs, but managing thousands of such deals is labor-intensive and complex, and negotiating for privileged inventory access has varied results. This proto-curation is distinct from the curation models we see emerging today, and is the answer to the question of why curation is different from the approach trading desks have taken with PMPs for the last decade.
The Evolution of Curation: Standard and Smart Approaches
In recent years, curation has evolved into two distinct forms: Standard Curation and Smart Curation. Both approaches build upon the foundations laid by proto-curation, yet they offer unique methodologies and benefits.
Standard Curation involves human intervention to select inventory based on specific buyer criteria. This approach is akin to proto-curation but is more focused and refined, and often done on behalf of the publisher. Manual curators negotiate inventory access with publishers, ensuring that DSPs receive bid opportunities that meet predefined criteria. This method provides a critical layer of control and efficiency that open exchanges cannot offer, making it indispensable for buyers seeking to optimize their programmatic strategies. This curation is happening inside of platforms designed to improve and streamline the work buyers have been doing for the last decade by providing strong workflow and tools to streamline the process of curating inventory through PMPs.
Another piece of the puzzle is that curation is done typically on the sell-side of the ecosystem. It’s in the publisher’s best interest to curate inventory from their end and to ensure that any privileged access to inventory is coming through curation platforms, so they can preserve prices and margins. Sometimes the manual curation is done by the publisher’s sales team, sometimes it’s done by a third party on behalf of the publisher.
Frequently these platforms bring together audience data as a differentiator, sometimes they act as the means for an advertiser to bring their own first party data to the media environment. Publishers typically put PMPs from their curation partners into higher privileged positions in the ad server than those done for advertisers and agencies directly – because it’s in the publisher’s interest to increase curated inventory’s value. Examples of these curation platforms include Permutive and Audigent.
Smart Curation, on the other hand, leverages advanced technology to enhance the curation process. By utilizing proprietary algorithms, signals, and data, smart curation refines inventory selection, aligning buying decisions with advertisers’ strategic goals. Unlike manual curation, smart curation minimizes human intervention, relying on advanced technology to streamline processes and maximize efficiency. Examples of smart curation include Yieldmo and OneTag.
Note – for all forms of curation, every vendor in the ecosystem is developing some curation product that proposes to be the way that curation should be done. Nearly every SSP/Exchange has a curation tool or marketplace, lots of the older data companies are getting into the curation game, and there are several standalone curation platforms on the market now. The goal of this article is to get you up to speed on what everyone’s talking about, and go a bit deeper into why it matters.
Curation isn’t just about Curated Audiences
While this is a significant use-case, curated inventory against audiences defined in advertiser first-party data, potentially with lookalike audiences, it’s not the only use case. Many curation engines are not using user data or targeting audiences. Many are curating using contextual data, some with other performance signals. This is an important distinction because there have been several movements to rebrand curation against the concept of Curated Audiences, which in my mind are a subset of curation overall.
Dispelling Misconceptions: Curation vs. Ad Networks
Beware anyone telling you that curation is merely a rebranded version of ad networks. This simply isn’t true, and is often thrown out by very experienced people in the industry as a way to diminish the value of curation – but saying it sounds smart while truly missing the point of what curation is. While both models involve intermediaries, their methodologies and value propositions are fundamentally different.
Ad networks thrived on market inefficiencies, engaging in arbitrage without adding significant value beyond transactional convenience. Conversely, curation—whether manual or smart—focuses on optimizing inventory selection without engaging in arbitrage. Curation grants inventory access ahead of buyers coming in directly through their DSP through the open exchange. Curation provides DSPs with refined bid opportunities at higher levels of privilege in the auction to improve results. There are no hidden costs or markups; instead, curation aims to maximize advertisers’ investments by aligning inventory with campaign goals.
Navigating the Programmatic Ecosystem with Curation
To fully appreciate curation’s value, it’s important to understand the programmatic ecosystem’s complexity. From Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) to Pre-Bid Frameworks and Ad Server prioritization rules, numerous factors influence buyer-seller relationships. Advertisers lacking privileged access risk losing valuable impressions, a challenge that curation effectively addresses by refining bid opportunities.
The impact of this kind of privileged inventory access:
Imagine two bids on the same root impression that is sent to the exchange – even from the same DSP. Bid 1 could be $5.00 against the open exchange. Bid 2 could be $5.00 against a curated PMP. Bid 2 will always win because the publisher is going to favor (give privilege to) the PMP that they are curating for that advertiser. To make it even more complicated, some publishers may give enough privilege to curated PMPs that cost doesn’t even matter. If Bid 1 through the open exchange was $50, and Bid 2 through the curated PMP was $5 – Bid 2 would always win.
DSPs evaluate each bid opportunity provided by exchanges and SSPs, valuing them based on campaign objectives. While comprehensive, this approach is inefficient, as most bid opportunities hold little value for a specific campaign. And DSP bidder algorithms are valuing every bid opportunity – when not every bid opportunity even warrants any scrutiny. Buying a bad piece of inventory just because the cost is low enough doesn’t really help lead to good outcomes. Consequently, the shift towards PMPs and curated inventory has become a strategic necessity to screen out inventory that shouldn’t be in consideration.
Standard curation continues to provide value, especially when curators negotiate priority access with publishers. Meanwhile, smart curation utilizes technology to either streamline the process, or to find powerful new ways to define and value inventory altogether. Smart curation is not the evolution of curation, it’s a subset of curation that defines and values inventory differently based on proprietary data and advanced algorithms and data to make informed decisions earlier in the bid stream than the DSP. Both approaches have value in enhanced access to inventory, increases in performance, increases in efficiency and offering significant value beyond what DSPs alone can achieve.
Strategic Implications and Future Directions
As programmatic advertising advances, the strategic implications of curation are profound. Advertisers must discern which platforms and technologies offer genuine value, distinguishing between superficial buzzwords and solutions delivering tangible results.Publishers, too, should embrace the transparency and efficiency that curation offers. By collaborating with advertisers and technology providers, they can increase yield, preserve pricing, and unlock new revenue streams that enhance their competitive edge in a rapidly evolving market.
The lessons from previous ad tech waves remain relevant. Balancing innovation with value creation is critical, and success hinges on our ability to adapt and evolve. Curation represents not only a technological advancement but a strategic shift poised to redefine programmatic advertising’s future. By navigating this new terrain thoughtfully, advertisers and publishers can unlock new opportunities and drive meaningful results in an increasingly competitive market.
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