By Keith Arrowsmith, Global Marketing Director
In media coverage on programmatic advertising, curation is often framed as a battleground between the buy side, the sell side, and publishers. But that view misses the bigger picture.
Done right, curation isn’t about sides. It’s about system-level outcomes that benefit everyone involved and address the pain points that have long held programmatic back. Where programmatic once created clutter, inefficiency, and waste, sell-side curation has the potential to streamline operations and improve performance across the board.
At Onetag, we see smart curation as a shared opportunity. For brands and buyers, it increases access to high-quality, data-enriched inventory, simplifies planning, and drives better outcomes. For publishers, it delivers more demand, higher bid density, and new advertisers alongside open exchange revenue. And for the entire ecosystem, it brings a more efficient, transparent, and sustainable programmatic model, powered by advanced infrastructure and agentic AI.
If advertising is the lifeblood of the open internet, what can the sell side learn from the buy side to help it thrive? Because brands and buyers fund the ecosystem with their investments, we believe in operating with buyer outcomes in mind.
Onetag has been a pioneer in curation for over a decade, building advanced traffic shaping and inventory optimization capabilities from the ground up. And because we have buy-side DNA, we know how to provide media that converts for buyers on inventory that performs from publishers.
Providing the buy side assist
The legacy model on the buy side was simple: launch a campaign, gather performance data, and iterate. In other words, ‘burn and learn.’ You spent to discover what worked, then hoped to spend smarter the next time.
But as programmatic has scaled, it’s been bogged down by duplicative traffic, bloated bidstreams, and auctions that deliver limited value. DSPs are overwhelmed with inventory passed along by sell-side pipes that lack the filtering and optimization needed to support better decisioning. To cope, they throttle the bidstream and reduce queries per second (QPS), often ending up with the same narrow, misaligned slice of supply.
Onetag is built to help the buy side cut through that noise. Our global exchange and vertically-integrated Smart Curation Platform are engineered to do the heavy lifting upstream. We process 170 billion auctions daily, using traffic shaping to filter, score, and rank impressions before they ever reach the DSP. Only the most relevant, performance-aligned impressions make it through, giving buyers stronger outcomes and giving publishers better monetization.
By removing inefficiencies before the bid, we help buyers waste less, learn faster, and scale more effectively.
A DSP’s perspective on the sell side
Our roots are on the buy side. Originally developed to power P&G’s media buying operations, Onetag was built to think like a DSP. This perspective shapes everything we do. We know what it’s like to optimize toward performance goals while having to justify spend. And we know that good curation is about making smarter, faster decisions using the signals that actually matter.
When you’ve sat in the DSP seat, you think differently about the bidstream. That’s why our deals aren’t static packages. They’re dynamic, responsive, and optimized in real time based on your KPIs. We work as an extension of your bidder, helping you spend less time triaging and more time scaling proven methods.
This approach also ensures we drive differentiated demand for our publishers. Our greater data processing and decisioning intelligence ensures we unlock the value in ad placements that is often missed by other global exchanges and curation platforms in the bidstream.
Efficient infrastructure and higher performance
Tech advances in AI and the cloud have changed the game. Platforms can now process, score, and route billions of impressions in milliseconds, but only if they’ve crafted the infrastructure to support that speed and scale. That’s why we built Onetag’s cloud infrastructure from the ground up, optimized specifically for ad exchange workloads.
By being able to process data at 2x-10x the velocity and volume, we operate more efficiently than legacy exchanges. This frees up resources to train better models, process more signals, and shape traffic more intelligently, a process that benefits the entire supply chain.
Efficiency means more impressions are relevant, fewer are wasted, and buyers spend less to achieve the same result. And it’s baked into Onetag’s infrastructure.
Better infrastructure and smarter buying benefit the whole industry
Burn-and-learn won’t disappear overnight, but the sell side can support the buy side more. When this happens, everyone wins:
- Advertisers minimize waste and generate faster ROI.
- Publishers see more demand for their high-quality inventory
- The ecosystem benefits from reduced complexity, cleaner supply paths, and faster ROI.
At Onetag, we build infrastructure that helps you buy smarter. If you’re ready to move beyond burn-and-learn, contact us. We’re here to help you get there.
Originally Published on: LinkedIn
