Over the past several years, curation has become one of the biggest topics in advertising, with brands and agencies spending 66% of the $150+ billion open exchange programmatic media market in curated private marketplaces (PMPs) and major players such as Coca-Cola and Google openly committing to curation. Amid all the growth, hype, and press, the definition of curation has been stretched in some places. Last week, Drew Stein, Managing Director and Co-founder of Audigent, a part of Experian, was featured by Forbes, defining what curation is and isn’t, what it can and cannot do, and what to look for to find the gold standard.
In programmatic advertising, curation refers to the strategic integration of data and inventory into a single, data-enriched package—commonly called a private marketplace. These curated packages are optimized to maximize value and performance for both advertisers and publishers. To be defined as a curator, a company must:
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Bring a unique set of data to the table to curate it against the inventory
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Have inventory from publishers [and data integrations with SSPs] to package with its data.
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Be capable of optimizing its packages of data plus inventory during a campaign [and in real-time]
Simply put, curation works by activating and optimizing data through the supply path, directly packaging data and inventory into a single, enriched product. When done correctly, three groups benefit through successful curation: brands/media agencies (buyers), publishers (sellers), and consumers.
For buyers, curated products represent an opportunity to lower costs (compared to buying DMP segments against open exchange), drive more performance out of their data with optimization, future-proof their media buying as real curation integrations are often cookieless, and use log-level data to drive value-added insights and reporting.
For publishers, curated products offer an opportunity to make their inventory more addressable and increase pricing off open exchange flooring.
For consumers, curation offers a more privacy-friendly path where legacy identifiers with personally identifiable information (PII) are no longer needed.
