By Keith Arrowsmith , Global Marketing Director at Onetag
This year curation has come to the fore as the key programmatic topic of conversation alongside AI. At our recent Curation Experience London event, hosted with our friends at Campari Group , the audience buzz was evident.
I was thrilled to moderate a panel discussion with industry leaders and deep dive into how the approach is working for the buy and sell side of programmatic advertising. Here are some of the key themes and insights we explored.
Now is the time for supply-side curation
As Audigent’s Drew Stein predicted earlier this year, the curation market could grow to $5 billion over the next two to three years. Therefore, it is crucial that we all understand how it works, what it can do and how curation services will shape the industry for the better.
There are a range of benefits of curation but here are a few worth highlighting:
- Implementing supply-side curation improves access to the impressions that matter for buyers and unlocks the true value of the open web
- Real-time user matching vastly improves addressability and scale for data, also in a consented and privacy-safe manner
- Faster and better outcomes are the result. To quote James Leaver of Multilocal, “curation just works” when it comes to faster and more dynamic delivery of lower CPMs and CPAs
It was great to hear the panel share the success stories they experience with curation and how it makes media work harder. The strong sustainability it delivers due to its greater efficiency is also highly desirable.
Supply-side curation benefits DSPs
The panel discussed how many DSPs see the intrinsic value curation provides, as the assist they need to extract smarter value from the bidstream and the better way to access targeting signals.
The curated approach is also required to access the blended rewards of semantic and contextual data, AI-powered audiences and ID solutions. These new signals work as a powerful combination, activated on the supply source for DSP use.
Without curation, DSPs only read a fraction of exchange requests, so they miss much of the value that the supply-side can offer and tailor this to the needs of their specific seats. Curation allows for a finely tailored and malleable approach to targeting specific KPIs, with the added benefit of real-time optimisation when equipped with the necessary data.
By enabling this assist, DSPs can deliver better results for their agencies and advertisers. To quote Miglena D., Head of Performance at the7stars, “At the end of the day, it’s all about driving results for clients.”
What publishers need to know
Publishers have faced very real challenges in recent years from the increased emphasis on user privacy and decreased access to consumer data in the face of cookie loss. In addition to that, programmatic advertising in general has tended to favour scale, and as such, has often worked better for the larger publishers than the smaller ones. But this is starting to change.
What curation offers is a new route to market, and a means to unlock additional demand and revenue streams. It enables monetization of the true value of inventory with advanced optimisation and richer targeting of editorial content using semantic data. Publishers can also achieve more scale for first-party data targeting on their inventory. The opportunity for publishers to access these benefits, and to categorise and enrich their inventory without reliance on third-party data sources, is a game-changer.
What next for curation?
- AI: Ongoing advances in data science and AI will keep driving improvements in curation optimisation and targeting. Smart curation (curation plus data science and data targeting) is a game-changer, but we still need to apply the human curation touch alongside.
- Addressability and outcomes: Curation already drives these, but next year they will become even more of a focus.
- Collaboration: With DSPs recognising curation as the way to deliver better results for their clients, open and trusting partnerships will lead to more win-wins for the sell and buy side. Collaboration on curation is also extending across media agencies and brands.
- Omnichannel: Expect to see more cross-channel curation, including progression of CTV.
As James Leaver rightly observed, “Curation solves a lot of the problems that have arisen in programmatic”. Stakeholders across all parts of the programmatic ecosystem are asking for a brand-safe, privacy-compliant solution with greater control, transparency and a new way to access signals at scale. Curation provides the comprehensive answer..
Original published on: LinkedIn
