By Keith Arrowsmith, Marketing Director, Onetag
In programmatic advertising, it’s still common to launch a campaign, spend budget to gather performance data, and then start to re-optimize once results come in. But while it’s long been accepted as standard practice, this “burn and learn” model is also a major source of waste, delay, and missed opportunity.
Some degree of testing is natural in any media plan. However, when you’re burning precious ad dollars just to figure out what works, waste is inevitable.
Thankfully, the industry no longer needs to settle for this kind of inefficiency. That’s because smarter infrastructure, better signals, and real-time decisioning now make it possible to optimize before spend happens.
Why burn and learn is a symptom of outdated infrastructure
Burn and learn persists not because it works, but because most platforms still aren’t built to do better.
Legacy supply-side platforms were never designed for optimization. They act as pass-through pipes, flooding DSPs with undifferentiated inventory. The burden of filtering, scoring, and selecting impressions falls entirely on the buy side. That process requires time, data, and money.
Here’s what happens as a result:
- Budgets are wasted on impressions that should’ve been excluded upstream
- DSPs throttle bidstreams or default to simplistic heuristics just to keep up
- Buyers are forced to optimize based on what they can see, not what’s best
- Valuable signals like placement quality, attention, and contextual fit are often missing or ignored
- Campaign outcomes are delayed and diluted
Burn and learn is a symptom of an inefficient system still reacting to problems instead of solving them at the source.
How to shape supply before the bid
Onetag’s approach flips this model. Instead of pushing every impression downstream and asking buyers to sort through the noise, our next-gen Global Exchange filters and shapes every impression before it enters the bidstream.
We call this Smart Curation. It’s powered by placement-level intelligence, real-time AI, and cloud-native infrastructure built to support large-scale decisioning. It works with the world’s leading demand platforms, and directly with our vertically integrated Smart Curation Platform for immediate deal ID creation.
Here’s how it works:
- Our highly efficient cloud-native infrastructure provides the processing and cost advantage for more data processing to train our Smart AI model, making large-scale optimization extremely fast and cost-effective.
- Real-time decisioning drives better buy-side outcomes, with advanced traffic shaping filtering out low quality media at the source based on proprietary placement-level meta data and KPI alignment.
- Our Global Exchange ensures the open internet is constantly optimized and brand safe, and the Smart Curation Platform further re-optimizes for the live goals of every DSP and buyer’s seat.
- Dynamic deal creation tools like OpenVerified, DealCurate and semantic data intelligence give buyers extra precision and flexibility.
With Smart Curation, buyers don’t need to waste time figuring out what works.
When performance pays off
When supply is shaped upstream and aligned with buyer KPIs from the start, the moving parts of programmatic media strategy work together:
- Campaigns start immediately in performance mode, not losing time in testing mode
- Buyers learn more, waste less, and win the impressions that matter
- Publishers see increased demand for their quality placements
- The entire ecosystem benefits from cleaner supply paths and smarter auctions
The live performance benefits of our global exchange and curation platform make the open internet work better and smarter.
Why burn and learn is a thing of the past
Burn and learn made sense in the early days of programmatic. But today, it’s a tax on inefficiency that buyers no longer need to accept.
Smart Curation makes it possible to align supply with outcomes before spend ever happens. And with the right infrastructure, signals, and decisioning in place, the entire system improves for everyone.
Ready to leave burn and learn in the past and see how Smart Curation can upgrade your next campaign? Contact Onetag today.
Originally Published on: LinkedIn
