By Keith Arrowsmith, Marketing Director, Onetag
For the full story of how Smart Curation for the Open Internet is solving programmatic advertising’s efficiency challenge, download the guide here.
In recent years, the reputation of the open web as an efficient, high-performing advertising channel has been tarnished by the sheer volume of poor-quality inventory that routinely finds its way into the bidstream. This low-quality inventory is also competing for advertisers’ attention, resulting in poor-performing campaigns and massive amounts of waste for advertisers.
With this waste comes a sustainability tax too, as demand-side platforms (DSPs) are required to process much more information than they need to, increasing digital advertising’s carbon footprint. Scope3 estimates that 184,400mt of CO2 emissions are wasted on these placements every year in the US programmatic display market alone.
Enter curation
Faced with these issues, the industry has been looking for solutions, and one that has seen rapid adoption is curation.
Curation works by giving buyers direct access to supply side-inventory, applying programmatic technology to create and manage campaigns. It provides both advertisers and publishers with a more efficient way of carrying out the ad buying/selling process. In doing so, it enables brands, retailers, publishers and data providers to combine their first-party data with inventory sourced from third-party publishers within Deals, also known as Private Marketplaces (PMPs), which can then be delivered to demand-side platforms (DSPs) as easy-to-activate Deal IDs.
Curation facilitates more efficient bidding via better user matching for greater scale and faster outcomes, without having to contend with deal throttling. Control for advertisers is increased through the ability to immediately apply and manage unique campaign targeting directly at the source of supply.
Additionally, Smart Curation technology removes low-quality ad placement wastage at source, then algorithmically curates high-quality media impressions across the premium open web. This advanced traffic shaping provides advertisers with additional scale for campaigns, including access to fresh audiences.
This leads to improved campaign execution and measurement, with a clear path from advertiser to inventory, reducing intermediaries, while at the same time delivering the right audiences. It also significantly reduces the carbon footprint of curation-powered ad campaigns – by filtering and refining data and optimising better performing impressions for the buy-side, curation minimises the volume of information processed by DSPs, improving efficiency, and aligning with sustainability goals.
Data providers use curation to achieve significantly higher match rates for their segments at the source of supply, compared with the traditional approach of activating this on the demand side in DSPs via DMPs. This increased addressability leads to higher campaign engagement for data-based Deal IDs pushed from curation platforms to DSPs.
Media buyers embrace curation
For these and many other reasons, media buyers are investing in the potential of curation. In our Smart Curation for the Open Internet guide in association with ExchangeWire, nine out of 10 European brands and agencies said that at least some of their advertising spend was directed via curation platforms, with three in 10 saying that the figure was at least 40%.
In addition, 43% of respondents said they use curation to leverage predictive audience data for campaign planning, while 41% use it to improve ROI through greater ad spend efficiency. Other common use cases include the avoidance of reputational risk through user-based tracking, and leveraging contextual information for privacy-compliant targeting.
Smart Curation
Onetag’s curation platform adds AI into the mix. Onetag Smart Curation serves as an advanced integrated media curation suite with two main approaches to innovate programmatic planning and activation – OpenVerified and DealCurate.
OpenVerified is designed for open-auction buying, and provides a unique, sell-side algorithmic approach at DSP seat level. A set of optimisation levers enables maximum control and flexibility, including MFA filtering and, powered by Sincera metadata, ads-to-content ratio (A2CR) and maximum ads in view.
DealCurate is a deal creation solution that gives users comprehensive access to campaign planning, including a proprietary semantic dataset for granular cookieless contextual data. For advertisers, it delivers improved scale, performance and measurement, as well as greater control and flexibility.
Smart Curation drives, on average, nearly 30% higher CTR and viewability compared with non-curated inventory across the open auction – with semantic data more than doubling CTR for many campaigns.
There are also extensive benefits for publishers: the Onetag Global Exchange and Smart Curation together provide publishers with incremental revenue by helping buyers achieve better media performance. Curation identifies your top-performing ad units to attract higher CPMs and grow placement value over time.
Curation, especially when backed by the incredible processing and analytical powers of AI, offers a powerful weapon in the ongoing fight to keep the programmatic advertising ecosystem clean, sustainable and effective.
Originally published on: LinkedIn
