Today ad agencies are expected to deliver campaigns that drive business goals while contending with increasing expectations for brand safety and user privacy. All of this is taking place during the decline of third-party cookies, which has threatened the efficacy of demand-side targeting.
Buyers are now leveraging curation, a long-time supply-side tool designed to maximize demand response to create desired supply paths. Often in the form of private marketplaces (PMPs), supply-side curation allows buyers to only listen and decide on supply that provides the best chance for desired outcomes.
The slow march towards cookie deprecation has had many looking for what will deliver at least some of the precise targeting that cookied advertising provided while respecting consumer privacy standards.
Curation helps agencies access more signals on the supply side creating a direct path to relevant audiences and less fragmentation.
What Supply-Side Curation Is
Put simply, it’s supply-side decisioning. More specifically, it means publishers, content creators, and ad tech companies working from the supply side can identify and aggregate valuable supply and, through data, provide ideal targets or blocks for specific advertisers.
Supply-side curation is extremely effective and often powered by two unique methodologies: segmentation and machine learning or sometimes actual generative AI. For segmentation, buyers can target supply based on shared audience characteristics or contextual content. Based on custom algorithms, machine learning/AI filters inventory on a continuous feedback loop. Supply-side curation happens before the bid even reaches the DSP (hence supply-side decisioning). Pre-selected, high-performing inventory refines targeting using advanced data signals packaged into custom PMPs – similar to how you filter tap water to improve quality and taste.
Access to Premium Inventory
Unfortunately, much of today’s supply landscape is filled with low-quality, made-for-advertising (MFA), or irrelevant inventory. Moving targeting and optimization further up the supply path offers pre-vetted and high-quality inventory and avoids the glut of low-quality opportunities that often swamp programmatic buyers.
Curation uses numerous signals, including first and third-party audiences, contextual intelligence, and metadata to identify the best content to run ads against, often making the output even more valuable than some stand-alone demand-side targeting methods.
Programmatic becomes more efficient with curation and improves overall inventory quality in several ways:
- Built-in brand safety, due to manual supply-side blocks and algorithmic enhancement
- Waste reduction or elimination – with the peace of mind that the inventory is high-value as defined by the target mandate
- Enhanced control of where the ads appear
Cost-Effectiveness
When the marketplace is more efficient, everyone wins. Agencies can simultaneously bid on multiple curated PMPs, and the supply-side can offer custom packages to many potential buyers instead of the cumbersome and costly process of direct sold inventory. Supply-side curation removes inefficient inventory from the buy and allows agencies to vet inventory aligned with their campaign goals.
Boosts in Efficiency
DSP targeting by design analyzes only fractions of the overall marketplace to minimize costs and streamline bids, especially given the rise of supply path optimization (SPO).
Conversely, curation analyzes the entire bidstream, delivering a more cost-efficient mix of broader options that are boiled down to the most relevant targets. Moving to the supply side allows buyers to package different targeting tactics like audience, contextual, geo, device extension in addition to viewability and brand safety tools – often clearing the way for better budget application. Often, when targeting on the demand side, each tactic incurs an a la carte fee – lowering the overall working media campaign budget.
It Restores Trust in the Process
Agencies, on behalf of clients, still want control over where their ads run and who they reach. Curation offers this by giving agencies supply-side tools and services that allow for direct supply manipulation, rather than simply decisioning on whatever is received.
Streamlined Media Buying and Operational Efficiency
Agencies are not adequately serving their customers if they are wallowing in manual supply adjustments, fraud detection, and post-campaign optimizations. Curation eliminates the need to manually sort through bids and filter out bad placements post-campaign, which takes time and represents wasted spend.
Curation is Here to Stay
Between the emergence of specialized curation companies and growing conversations in the media, curation will be around for a while.
Curation will only grow in importance as AI technology improves and more ad tech companies embed it into their offerings. Agencies looking for a competitive edge over others should accelerate their understanding and adoption of supply-side targeting.
Agencies get the best of all worlds: targeting advertising opportunities confirmed to be high value offered through programmatic exchanges, the perfect marriage reach and brand-safe, smart targeting.
Agencies should immediately engage with independent curation companies to learn more and identify ways to put supply-side curation into practice.
This original article was originally featured on Performance Marketing World.
