By Elli Papadaki , SVP Global Supply Sales, Onetag
Seb Joseph’s Digiday article “The Semantic Slide of Programmatic’s Power Word: Curation”, examines the industry’s wider use of this term and the vagueness this is causing. Curation represents a market shift, and as with any major change, others will seek to join the wave and benefit from its positive halo effect.
For instance, we saw this with the rise of CTV advertising, where the likes of UGC and pop-up formats label themselves as such alongside the original CTV premise of appearing directly in long-form, professionally produced content. Looking at broader business and societal trends, the dot.com boom of the 1990s and early 2000s saw countless businesses rebrand as tech companies – many without a viable business model or strategy. Similarly in the 1960s, following the British music invasion led by The Beatles and other great artists, countless groups imitated their style – often without the same substance. For every trend, we evaluate its participants by asking the same questions: what do you provide that is meaningful, real and makes my life better?
The IAB is working on the industry definition of curation, and we expect this to reiterate its core principle of sell-side decisioning to improve inventory quality and outcomes for the buy side. In our previous article, From buzzword to better advertising, why supply-side curation is the smart approach in 2025, we also sought to provide clarification and address some misconceptions we were seeing in the media about its application and benefits. Here we outlined how curation gives buyers direct access to supply-side inventory to curate all data signals and target the impressions that matter at scale. Doing this on the supply source ensures:
- Greater efficiency: access the inventory you really need without throttling.
- Greater scale: achieve far higher addressability, via real-time user matching combining first-party data with placement optimization.
- Greater performance: improve ROI with more performant inventory delivering faster outcomes.
Digiday’s article includes three key questions to validate true curation – and here are some important additional considerations to support them:
Do they have meaningful data – deterministic, contextual or otherwise?
In AdvertisingWeek, we summarised Supply-side data signals: the heart of programmatic’s curation engine and how the likes of ID, ID-less, semantic and contextual solutions combine with comprehensive real-time AI understanding of the attributes of ad placements.
First-party data is a key ingredient but needs to combine with other solutions when only 15-30% of open web users are authenticated. Hashed identifiers, Universal IDs and ID-less targeting help fill these gaps, with the latter leveraging privacy-safe, decentralized signals for effective targeting and frequency control without reliance on personal identifiers. Additionally, semantic data enhances contextual targeting with machine learning that understands the deeper meaning of page content to improve campaign precision and scale.
With the industry shifting toward a cookieless, privacy-first world, brands and buyers need a blended approach that scales meaningful data across the fragmented media landscape. The best supply-side curation platforms provide these ingredients for better audience targeting by the buy side, plus their own proprietary differentiators for hyper-targeting and optimization. Smart curation technology then further orchestrates the array of signals, with real-time AI analyzing every bit of data to support the deal creation and management process for curators.
Do they have access to real supply, preferably through a direct SSP integration?
Direct access to real supply for buyers, alongside direct access to incremental demand for publishers, is essential for curation platforms to perform and enable the programmatic ecosystem to flourish. Curation providing this real supply access is also leading to it now being described as the next evolution of SPO, giving the buy side control of inventory quality.
We also identify two approaches to ensuring you access real supply. ‘Vertical curation’ is provided by SSPs and exchanges who offer direct access to curation platforms layered on top of their global infrastructure and premium publishers. Meanwhile, ‘horizontal curation’ occurs via leading managed curation services who also work across the curation layers of these exchanges. Establishing that your curation partner is integrated with these trusted supply sources is essential.
Most importantly – can they optimize any of it, or are they just dressing up a data management platform?
Firstly, let’s remember that DSPs can only listen to and buy a fraction of available impressions in a bidstream with limited QPS and irrelevant inventory. When deal decisioning only happens on the buy side, buyers are limited to buying more of what they already know and at a general rather than individual seat level. Conversely, when curation decisioning happens on the sell-side, it significantly improves user matching and general addressability, increasing the scale and performance of data signals. This all helps strengthen DSP economics and ROI while reducing operational inefficiency.
While human and manual curation of inventory is still a core component of curation – especially in the setting of initial targeting criteria for highly targeted deals – to achieve its potential the process must also be powered by real-time AI and algorithmic decisioning.
The foundation of leading smart curation platforms is proprietary AI and ML that optimizes and enriches impressions at the ad placement level. This sifts out low-quality ad placements at the inventory source, identifies and delivers the most performant inventory in real time. Providers must also be interoperable with leading data partners and identifiers to ensure impressions are enriched with their meaningful data.
Yes, the term “curation” is being stretched, and in some cases, diluted. Knowing what is offered is therefore vital to ensure you use trusted vendors that truly deliver on its potential. Sell-side curation with real-time decisioning is the way forward for programmatic deal activation, as third-party cookies phase out and privacy regulations tighten. Deals created on the supply source deliver greater addressability and scale, access to more of the impressions you need, and trusted supply chains for the buy side. Smart curation technology is also the foundation that underpins the process, making its flywheel spin faster to accelerate quality outcomes.
If curation is a label, be sure to check the ingredients – when done right, it will transform your programmatic media.
Original published on: LinkedIn
