What is curation & how is it transforming programmatic advertising?

In today’s crowded digital space, effectively reaching the right audience is more essential - and complex - than ever. Curation offers a precise, streamlined approach to programmatic advertising, cutting through the clutter and ensuring each ad impression is meaningful.  

Though curation has long been a means of programmatic buying, the practice is evolving into a supply-centric approach to match an industry that has increasingly matured and scaled. To no surprise, this change has created industry buzz, striking debate on whether this new wave of curation can deliver on its promise of added value creation. 

It’s important to acknowledge there are several market conditions behind this shift. Addressability concerns have highlighted the need for more granular targeting capabilities, creating new opportunities to leverage first-party publisher data.  

At the same time, marketers are seeking greater transparency and control over the buying process as they scrutinise campaign efficacy. This demand has only grown with increasing concerns over made-for-advertising (MFA) sites and quality inventory. But curation represents more than just an opportunity to address these immediate concerns.  

It signals a broader paradigm shift in how we transact digital media, offering a path to bolster value creation on the supply side and benefit all parties across transactions. As with any programmatic tool or advancement, fulfilling that promise depends on upholding high quality and transparency standards, as well as economic efficiencies, across the supply chain. 

To fully understand the potential curation holds, let’s revisit how we got to where we are today. 
 

The evolution of curation from ad networks to curated marketplaces 

Going back to its earliest form, curation began with ad networks creating packages based on content and audiences. The rise of programmatic buying then introduced data-driven strategies and deals, allowing marketers to reach audiences and content in real-time. Later, direct sales moved to private marketplaces to facilitate closer relationships between buyers and sellers.  

Over time, programmatic scaled and the number of bid requests sent to DSPs and marketers grew exponentially. This was notably due to the standardisation of header bidding, which set the stage for levelled playing fields and more competitive auctions compared to the preceding waterfall model.  

Media buyers needed to evaluate a higher volume of deals with more media owners, and DSPs faced new challenges in managing efficiency and controlling their costs. This increased the demand for more sophisticated deal curation - buyers didn’t want or need to be sent every impression opportunity. They wanted the right mix of relevant inventory that would deliver on a campaign’s desired outcomes, at scale.

Today, curated marketplaces help meet that demand.  
 

Unlocking more value with supply-side curation 

Historically, curation was largely the domain of DSPs, but today we’re seeing that extend to the supply side as well - which, in doing so, unleashes more working media and more efficient scale, benefiting the entire industry.

Optimised outcomes for buyers 

As SSPs serve media owners, they’re positioned with a broader view of available supply across the open internet. Their infrastructure is inherently designed to handle massive volumes of bid requests. In contrast, DSPs face the challenge of concurrently evaluating auction opportunities from many SSPs. To protect from overloading servers, DSPs commonly institute constraints around how many queries per second (think: auctions per second) that an SSP can send to them.  

We see an opportunity for addressing limitations that come with these guardrails, where SSPs leverage their infrastructure to unlock additional value and scale while empowering DSPs to efficiently and sustainably optimise outcomes for marketers. 

Curation helps buyers ensure their preferred DSP receives only quality and relevant inventory to best meet campaign-specific objectives. The intuition is straightforward: if you're targeting a scarce audience, would you rather look for them across the full pool of inventory at the mouth of the funnel, or scan the narrow tail of the funnel, where various filtering logic and processes (often based on platform-level inputs, rather than campaign-specific needs) have already been applied?  

New opportunities for media owners 

Curation’s not just a tool for buyers - it holds transformative value for media owners as well. In a rapidly changing landscape marked by signal loss and increased competition, curation drives incremental and differentiated demand, while still providing transparency and allowing media owners to maintain full control over their inventory and pricing.  

It also offers media owners a path to align more closely to buyers’ priorities and goals, thereby boosting the value of their inventory. Buyers often rely on curation to reach specific audiences across a range of inventory sources. For media owners that may not have huge scale but carry interesting or niche audiences, it can be an especially powerful lever to gain visibility and attract more demand. 

Though curation has been around for some time, the way it works from an economic perspective can vary across platforms. The approach we’ve taken at Index is to align the economic model of Index Marketplaces (our platform used for curation amongst other use cases) fully with media owners. We don’t take any additional fees that would deteriorate working media and maintain the same revenue share with media owners that we always have. As a company, we only win when our supply partners win. A net bid remains a net bid, and auctions remain competitive with all sources of demand. 

The economic benefits and risks of the recent curation hype have been a chief concern for media owners, and understandably so. The advice here is straightforward: do your due diligence with your partners. Understand where their economic incentives lie, and make sure they’re just as invested in the success of your partnership as you are.  

Streamlined operations & market addressability for solution providers 

Curators and solution providers can unlock a material operational efficiency win, as they don’t need to integrate with every DSP, agency, or media owner. By sequencing operations further upstream, players can extend the benefits of their solutions to all DSPs without significant infrastructure investments—and let’s not understate how challenging it is to compel many disparate platforms to prioritise their development resources against competing initiatives. 

Buyers and traders can then transact using a single deal ID across their preferred DSPs, significantly streamlining the programmatic buying process and solving market fragmentation challenges. 

Igniting new levels of programmatic innovation 

Curation has revealed that SSPs can build additional value on top of their extensive infrastructure to unlock more scale. And when operated under efficient economics, it stands to ignite innovation across the ecosystem.  

Curators, commerce media networks, data providers, and agencies have already embraced curated marketplaces, but the industry is still scratching the surface of market potential. New categories of companies (many of which don’t come from advertising roots) are just beginning to harness curated marketplaces to scale their businesses.  

However, this hinges on applying to curation the foundational standards that protect the integrity of our ecosystem. Curation works when there is transparency and clear value across everyone in the supply chain; bringing more demand to media owners, helping solution providers grow new types of businesses, and driving optimal media outcomes for marketers. 

We’re already seeing the potential being realised. Like the rise of header bidding nearly a decade ago, curation is bringing about a vast sea change for the industry. With the ease of scaling, improved efficiency, and added ROI, budgets are moving to curation faster than any other shift in programmatic.  

Curation is no longer a trendy buzzword - it's rapidly creating more value throughout the ecosystem and becoming essential to driving stronger campaign outcomes. And when it comes to programmatic advertising, performance speaks louder than any buzzword ever could.  

Want to learn more about the curation potential? Explore Index Marketplaces to see how you can unlock new opportunities for success. 

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