Last year, curation gained significant industry attention and this year, it has already been featured in multiple trend reports. The momentum around this trend seems to still be building. Last week, Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale said he sees it as the biggest shake-up in programmatic advertising since header bidding.

In a recent Digiday article, Casale shared his predictions, stating, “Curation will be bigger than header bidding and as big as programmatic or RTB,” because in his view, “...while header bidding was a technical shift, curation is fundamentally about economics.” Sell-side curation is a win-win for both advertisers and publishers as the sell-side has access to more bidding data than the buy-side, meaning it can surface more impressions to advertisers. Casale confirms this by saying, “In some curation use cases we were already finding scarcer audiences that were there the entire time, but it was being throttled away and never getting to the DSP.”

If Casale’s approach to programmatic advertising scales at the pace he predicts, it could start to reshape ad tech’s fee structure, where he says, “Marketers that have more ad dollars going to working media tend to have better win rates in the auction and if they’re finding scarcer audiences who are going to buy their products then they’re likely to sell more. These are good things for the open internet at large.

We are just in the early rounds of curation driving innovation across the ad tech ecosystem and as the open internet continues to evolve, curation’s full potential is just beginning to be realized. Casale said, “The open internet needs its version of [Google’s Performance Max], and I think what’s happening in curation is going to ignite that.” He thinks he’s on to something and some marketers think so too. “We’ve been spending the better part of the last two years working closely with the buy-side because of the curation trend. They’ve been calling us and coming to us because they’re excited at the innovative opportunity this represents.”