By Salvatore Nicotra, Chief Innovation Officer, Onetag
Onetag: Smart Curation of supply-side data signals is redefining the efficiency of programmatic advertising
Month by month, supply-side curation is steadily reshaping advertising inventory optimization strategies, ensuring more relevant impressions and enhancing campaign performance. By leveraging advanced data science and real-time artificial intelligence technologies, supply-side data signals serve as the strategic engine to maximize inventory value and optimize advertising investments.
“Optimizing inventory at the source represents a turning point in programmatic advertising. Through supply-side curation, we ensure that only the most high-performing impressions are offered to the demand-side, significantly improving ad placement quality and reducing waste,” says Salvo Nicotra, Chief Innovation Officer at Onetag.
Relevance boosts performance
When applied efficiently, sell-side curation optimizes data signals to boost their relevance and improve advertising performance. Through data science, AI, and machine learning, the process eliminates ineffective placements, maximizes scalability and improves user matching. This approach optimizes inventory at the source, increasing efficiency and ROI for advertisers.
Not all ad impressions are equal
The characteristics of ad placements are constantly evolving. To navigate this complexity, it is essential that advertisers leverage advanced curation technologies – including real-time artificial intelligence.
These technologies help reduce waste and optimize impressions in real time. Key media data curation metrics include:
- Quality filtering including Invalid Traffic (IVT) and identifying MFA (Made for Advertising) sites
- Attention metrics such as time-in-view and ads-to-content ratio
Smart curation of ad placements is further enhanced by working with partners who specialize in measurement for additional media quality and attention scoring. This combined intelligence ensures that all data signals work in synergy to maximize impression quality, reducing waste before defining campaign performance objectives.
Life after cookies: ID-less solutions and semantic targeting
The leading identity solutions, which are fully interoperable with curation platforms, enable advertisers and publishers to bid on and acquire pure cookieless traffic within the bidstream.
Curation allows for blending of multiple deterministic and probabilistic solutions, avoiding reliance on a single provider and maximising reach across audience data signals.
Given the loss of third-party cookies, curation platforms are integrating ID-less data to ensure effective and privacy-compliant targeting. To illustrate the scale of cookie loss and how much supply-side curation of new solutions can help, the IAB UK estimates as little as 18% of the open web is now addressable via cookies, factoring in non-cookie browsers, users who disable them in Chrome, and further user matching loss through cookie sync. New decentralized signals are replacing cookies and personal information with anonymized data, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations while enabling targeting, retargeting and frequency capping of impressions.
ID-less audiences are dynamically built over time based on interests, geolocation, behaviors, and user actions. Supply-side curation activates these data signals at a much larger scale for the buy side, significantly improving addressability, user matching and minimizing data leakage. These signals are also dynamically updated and optimized to improve quality and conversion rates for advertisers.
Thanks to curation, buyers and brands can test and identify the most effective ID-less audience combinations in real-time without waiting for the complete phase-out of cookies.
Furthermore, semantic data for advanced targeting is revolutionizing contextual advertising, by leveraging machine learning to understand the deeper meaning of content and ensure greater relevance and scale for advertisers.With millions of data points being analyzed, advertisers can implement more precise and granular contextual targeting strategies across the premium open web, covering broad or highly specific content areas. Semantic data signals have been shown to significantly improve performance and conversion rates while being privacy-friendly, cookieless and brand-safe.
Sustainability: a key benefit of curation
The increasing climate urgency requires businesses to reduce carbon emissions. Curation minimizes waste and optimizes impressions, helping to lower the carbon footprint of digital advertising. Comprehensive emissions data from smart curation technology is now proving how significant this saving is, with emissions intensity, number of bids required and data transferred per impression being a fraction of the programmatic industry average.
By measuring environmental impact, brands can integrate smart curation sustainability data into their corporate carbon footprint reports, offsetting emissions in other business areas.
Let the supply side lead the way forward
Taken as a whole, supply-side curation tackles the challenges of programmatic advertising on numerous fronts. With its combination of real-time AI and data science executed at greater scale on the supply source, it provides the approach buyers need to achieve better, faster quality outcomes. So watch this space: tomorrow’s most meaningful innovations are coming from smart curation technology to ensure inventory that performs and quality that converts for the programmatic ecosystem.
Original published on: LinkedIn
