By Harry Charalambous , Commercial Director, EMEA, Onetag
There’s no getting away from all the coverage on curation, and we at Onetag are glad it’s getting the airtime it deserves. We firmly believe curation is the solution to a whole host of challenges impacting the industry, whether that’s the loss of existing demand-side signals, privacy and consent concerns, or the waste associated with poor-quality programmatic advertising.
Here are just some of the ways in which curation is driving positive changes and revenue outcomes across the ever-changing programmatic ecosystem, and how Onetag specifically is positioned to continue delivering optimal results on both the supply and the demand side.
Curation – it’s so much more than an ad network
Sell-side curation works so much harder than the traditional ad network model based on manual packaging and pricing of inventory. In simple terms, it provides access to supply-side inventory for the better way to execute programmatic advertising deal creation and management. Why?
- Better monetisation of the impressions that matter: curating impressions provides higher media quality, attention and performance for the demand side.
- More efficient bidding: DSPs only listen to and buy a fraction of available impressions, and generally buy more of what they know at a very broad level. Curation enables far better user matching on more of the supply that really matters, delivering greater scale and faster outcomes.
- Increased addressability for data targeting: applying data on the supply side increases scale by at least 50%. This will continue to increase as traditional targeting signals managed from the demand side decline further.
- Campaign control/dynamic changes: with curation, the buy side can directly apply and manage unique campaign targeting on the supply source.
Successful sell-side curation is founded in business relationships with partners who offer differentiated value. In addition to leading managed curation partners who work with multiple exchanges with a curation layer, ‘vertical curation’ is also provided by exchanges who offer direct access to their curation platforms layered on top of their global exchange infrastructure and publishers.
As brands look for partners who can support better and faster outcomes, with enhanced technical solutions, the Onetag Smart Curation platform provides the best of both worlds. Our advanced vertical solution is built on our global exchange where clients get direct access to the inventory of more than 2,000 premium publishers, plus proprietary Data Science, AI and Machine Learning coming together to drive the highest levels of media quality and performance. In addition, as part of our open and interoperable approach, we work with the industry-leading managed curation services.
Reaching the potential of the open web
Smart Curation provides the means to move beyond manual domain allow lists and the walled gardens: it unlocks the true value and diversity of the premium open internet, with laser-targeted ad placement level optimisation to maximise campaign effectiveness and reach. Manually curated domain lists provide one view of media quality and effectiveness, but they don’t address problematic ad placements wherever these may exist, how the composition of ad formats changes, and where further diversity and value can be found.
By employing advanced placement-level traffic-shaping, Smart Curation significantly boosts media quality and reach, while opening the door to this often untapped potential and diversity. At Onetag, this approach is significantly increasing open web revenues across both our exchange and Smart Curation platform year-on-year. Our proprietary technology is also securely future-proofed to support – and succeed within – an inevitably cookieless advertising environment.
Curation is a valuable partner to all
The supply side: Publishers are having to contend with ever-greater demands around user privacy, and thus limited consumer data sources. Curation offers scalable data targeting on their supply in the face of demand side signal loss.
It is also a means for publishers of all sizes to increase value for overlooked inventory. Curation offers powerful contextual advertising solutions, such as Onetag’s semantic data and Semantic Topics search tool built on a proprietary knowledge graph. Curation of semantic data provides an effortless way for the demand side to to target desired content wherever it is found, for instance on news sites that may otherwise be missed or even blocked.
There’s no need for disintermediation between publishers and the curation process, and at Onetag we layer our Smart Curation platform directly on top of our exchange at zero cost to curators. In fact, we are seeing significant revenue growth with no detrimental impact on existing revenue drivers for publishers, such as their revenue via the open marketplace.
The demand side: The curation of the bid stream at source in line with buyer KPIs means more control and faster delivery of outcomes – whether to achieve broad scale at lower eCPMs or narrow scale at higher eCPMs. Trusted independent platforms have long delivered additional value alongside SPO – the world’s leading DSPs work with Onetag alongside their proprietary solutions. What’s more, the Onetag Smart Curation platform is specifically designed for ease of access and use – and is available to curators at no cost.
Far from competing with the demand side, trusted smart curation services can simultaneously benefit partners on both sides of the programmatic spectrum, delivering higher addressability, increased efficiency, faster better outcomes and ultimately higher revenues.
The success of curation depends on two key factors. Firstly, the quality of the service provider. Secondly, the buy-in of all parties across the industry. So yes, the industry is rightly abuzz with ideas on what it means right now. But with so many reasons to embrace what curation has to offer, and so many already onboard, it will continue to go from strength to strength as we continue innovating new possibilities in 2025.
Original published on: LinkedIn
