Ad Curation: The Savior of the Open Web Programmatic Trading Market?

Ad Curation is the hot new product in adtech, fueled by a desire to prove to advertisers that spending on the Open Web can deliver performance. How will the curation debate play out?
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In June last year the influential Association of National Advertisers released a detailed programatic transparency report and found that the average digital ad campaign ran on 44,000 websites. This was not good news for the $88 billion open web programmatic advertising industry and it’s no surprise that revenue surged for the walled garden giants in the forth quarter of the year. Marketers want to know where their ads run, and they want performance (ROAS) for their media budgets. 

The open web players needed a smart response and the answer has been to deliver curated audiences to their agency clients and direct advertisers. Curation has taken off and every DSP and SSP has launched some form of programmatic curation offering. That tension has been marked by the SSP’s taking a more prominent role in the ad selection process as they can potentially deliver a better understanding of their audience. 

“Programmatic adtech companies including The Trade Desk, Xandr, Index Exchange, and OpenX are pitching advertiser on so-called curated services that include bespoke packages of web publishers, specialized software, and tailor-made algorithms”, reported Marketing Brew. Curation is booming on the sell-side of adtech as demand-side platforms increasingly venture into their territory.

“Today, almost every SSP has (or is building) a curation platform to capitalize on the advantages that curation brings – and that the sell-side systems have in empowering curation, added Andrew Kraft, an independent adtech writer.

Even Google, which dominates online ad trading, has read the tea leaves and in early November, the company launched a Google Ad Manager curation tool, promising to help agencies identify trends, find optimization opportunities and have more informed discussions with publishers about spend commitments.

Google Enters the Curation Market

“To help agencies deliver on their goals, we’re introducing new curation capabilities across Google Ad Manager inventory to help identify and purchase the best publisher inventory and audiences. This solution builds on our existing agency tools that help streamline workflows for reporting, discovery, forecasting, and packaging inventory, and makes it easier for agencies to manage their direct deals with publishers,” wrote Peentoo Patel, Director, Product Management, Google Ad Manager.” The launch was the first time Google has launched a curation tool on the supply-side. Google is also likely seeking to head off its biggest rival in open web advertising, The Trade Desk, which launched the SP 500+, a curated collection of top-quality publisher inventory sources, in June.

“Media buyers have long struggled to scale large budgets against narrowly defined audience segments while also maintaining quality. Choosing between PMP deals and navigating the open market, each come with their own set of pros and cons. But now, the Sellers and Publishers 500+ is making balancing scale and curation easier and more efficient. By raising the bar on quality and introducing innovation into how the platform bets and curates inventory, you will be able to navigate the advertising landscape more effectively,” The Trade Desk said. 

While many in the industry criticized The Trade Desk for its announcement, describing it as an inclusion list dressed up as a marketing ploy, it was a shot across the bow of its adtech ecosystem rivals.

Marketers are craving better ad management tools that preserve their media budgets, and ensure that the data smarts of these platforms deliver true value, and significantly reduce ad wastage. The ANA study last year estimated annual programmatic ad wastage in the US at $22 billion, or 25% of total spend. 

In the past year, defining ad curation has become a sport unto itself and the subject of numerous industry articles. Leading publication Digiday defines ad curation as a process whereby ad supply is curated from the vast, open programmatic market, where prices are determined in real-time auctions along these contours: audience data, contextual data, and supply chain integrity. Curation combines this data intelligently, with the right inventory, the publication noted. 

Along with data intelligence, the structure of curated ad deals is now firmly in the spotlight. Leading adtech executive Ari Paparo, who publishes the Marketecture newletter, argues that these are the advantages of curation for advertisers: more reach against desired data segments since it routes around DSP-led SPO (supply path optimization), easier to implement Deal ID campaigns, access to new kinds of data, no undermining of programmatic-guaranteed deals, and a reduction in the need to buy from resellers.

In other words, the perfect marriage of simplicity, better data, and an easier route to market.

 

Publishers and AI Tools Seek to Win

The ongoing tussle between the walled gardens and open web programmatic players has been a dominant theme for many years. The competitive landscape has also been super-charged with the imminent signal loss (via an opt-out prompt) from the Google Chrome third-party cookie next year, concerns over the proliferation of Made-For-Advertising fake websites, and the emergence of AI-fueled ad optimization offerings. 

The curation debate will certainly evolve and players will bring innovation to the market, in a bid to win more advertiser spend. Cognitiv and Index Exchange recently partnered in a curation and generative AI joint venture, enabling both tools to merge and be applied across DSPs, data activation platforms, and commerce media networks. The venture, first reported by Digiday, said Cognitiv’s platform uses its deep learning and OpenAI’s LLMs to analyze millions of websites each day to help advertisers target audiences without relying on cookies. 

“When Index sends an impression, Cognitiv provides real-time analysis to predict which ads will likely convert and then sends it back with an advertiser deal ID. Index then sends the impression to the advertiser’s demand-side platform before placing a bid.”

So who will win the digital advertising curation race? Ryan Maynard, who leads sales and programmatic strategy at premium ad network Raptive believes the new wave of curation houses often lack direct relationships with publishers. Therefore, publishers and SSPs should be more active in vocalizing their role in the ad placement and curation process. 

“SSPs have contractual partnerships in place. Publishers should leverage these partnerships, understand as much as possible about the multi-pub deals these sales teams bring them, and avoid any potential channel conflict/cannibalization.These strategic partners can definitely offer good deals. Publishers should take advantage while striving to sell their inventory and data directly to agencies and brands whenever possible.The onus is on publishers to offer compelling reasons why someone should buy directly vs via a curated open market deal.”

The open web auction process is complex, and possibly a turn-off for advertisers and agencies, who want simplicity, and easy to use buying interfaces. This hands a distinct advantage to the walled garden gorillas (Meta, Google, Amazon). Like every new wave of adtech, curation tools will need to deliver simplicity, value, and clarity in order to stimulate ongoing attention for marketers.


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