Advertising curation has not reached its zenith as an industry concern, judging by the renewed spate of maneuvering and attempts to shape opinions.
It’s indicative of what’s at stake in the $600 billion digital advertising industry – the large prize of juicy ad revenues from brands who are assessing best how to funnel their spend and reach attention-frazzled consumers.
Curation also promises brand marketers that they will not be exposed to the bad corners of the Open Web, and that their ad spend will avoid the corrosive impact of ad fraud, media wastage, and made-for-advertising websites.
In the middle are the demand-side (buy-side) platforms, and the publisher-side inventory agents, the sell-side platforms. There is a frenzy undergoing for each player to prove they are only delivering “the Quality Web” to advertisers.
The problem, as Digiday points out, is that semantic definitions of ad curation continue to shift, and an agreed industry descriptor has yet to be agreed on.
“Curation’s biggest problem might be its name,” Digiday wrote. “Everyone has a different version of it. Ask an adtech vendor, and curation is about packaging high-quality inventory for better performance. Ask a data broker, and it’s a vehicle for layering on proprietary audiences. Ask a publisher, and it is a rare chance to reassert some control in an ecosystem that’s spent the last decade pulling power away from them. The only thing everyone can agree on? It’s a growth area,” the publication wrote.
The industry title also added: “AdTech vendors view curation as assembling premium inventory for better outcomes, data brokers see it as a means to integrate proprietary audience data, and publishers consider it an opportunity to regain control in a landscape where they’ve traditionally had limited influence.”
There are a host of adtech platforms and players seeking top dog status in the curation space. However, the movement could signal an equalizing of strengths, compared to the origins of programmatic advertising, where control sat on the demand-platform side, and the sellers weren’t even sure why their ad slot was the target of a bid.
“Much of the discourse has been around how curation will impact buy-side and sell-side technologies in the open internet,” writes Aly Nurmohamed, Founder and CEO of Nodals AI. “The change that curation enables is that buyers and sellers are more intertwined, which means we will stop thinking about technologies as buy and sell side.”
That may be so, as AI takes center stage in identifying the best curated audiences. In the meantime, SSP’s are making their move, including Magnite and Index Exchange, who are seeking to de-position buy-side player The Trade Desk, which has made incursions into the sell-side.
The biggest gorilla in the room is of course Google’s buy-side offering, Performance Max, which its critics label as a black-box for ad budgets. In November, Google announced a suite of new features within Google Ad Manager to streamline media buying for agencies, including a new “curation” tool and enhancements to programmatic buying workflows. The company claimed it would allow agencies to easily discover and activate curated inventory packages and data segments from trusted partners.
It may actually be that curation has become a buzzword or a sales play, according to a report by ad analytics firm Adomik on fourth quarter programmatic ad transactions.
“We have not spotted any major brands that started to buy with Curation as the first thing they do,” the Adomik report said. “Still, for some brands, Curation has become the channel that attracts the most media spend. The media spend going through curation is generally shifted from other channels or might be additional in some situations. Some brands are probably increasing their overall media spend thanks to curation, but this is hard to identify.”
If anything, deal curation is likely to become more advanced and be augmented by AI tools, as outlined recently by marketing agency Butler/Till. As noted by AdExchanger, the agency ran a campaign for a financial services client that enabled it to take back control from (buy-side) legacy algorithms, and only buy ad impressions for users that had a higher propensity to convert.
Curation may be a re-badged and improved version of the old ad network model, but it’s surely here to stay as a bulwark against the vagaries of wild west open web advertising, which has seen brands exposed to unsavory websites.
As eMarketer notes, the open exchange will continue to lose share of programmatic ad spending to private marketplaces (PMPs) this year, “which speaks to the desire among advertisers for more transparency.”
Publishers need to be more urgent in order to catch the curation wave. A key concern for media owners is that they are being sidelines by the adtech middlemen, and will not secure increased revenues and boosted CPMs for the media content they produce.
However, their opportunity is to show to advertisers that their premium content is worth bidding for at a higher price.
“With their powerful signals, the winners in curation will be media owners with deep relationships with consumers,” said Nodals AI’s Nurmohamed. “As the data assets they generate get richer, more transparent, efficient, and effective, the more value they drive for advertisers. The losers are low-quality media owners – they will no longer be able to game the system once it rewards quality on the sell-side.”
