The definition of programmatic curation and how it helps the industry depends on how curators use their platforms. We explore the use cases.
Are you still unclear about what programmatic curation is or how it’s impacting the industry?
If the answer is yes, don’t worry, you’re on the right track. That’s because what curation is and how it helps the industry depends on the different ways curators use their platforms. This key concept is what’s missing from the recent debate on how curation will impact the adtech ecosystem.
The trade press, for all their excellent coverage, is speaking about curation as if it’s just one thing. It’s not. It’s many things.
If you try to understand curation by conflating its many applications, it’s easy to conclude that it will favor the largest pubs, hurt the long tail, needlessly challenge the role of DSPs, and add a meaningless layer of tech tax.
However, if we zero in on specific uses, you’ll see how curation can benefit all businesses across the supply chain, increase monetization for both large and long-tail publishers, foster innovation, and dramatically improve the environmental sustainability of programmatic advertising.
Let’s take a detailed look at just some of the ways a business can use a curation platform and discuss how those uses impact the adtech ecosystem. While the list below is extensive, it only covers some – not all – curation use cases.
Curation use: Managing a short roster of large strategic publishers the agency has agreements with
Objectives:
Benefits to the ecosystem:
Curation use: Applying expertise selecting publishers, targeting, vendors, and optimizing the supply path
Objectives:
Benefits to the ecosystem:
Curation use: Layer their segments or technology across open web supply
Objectives:
Benefits to the ecosystem:
This category is quite high level and could be subdivided several times. Examples of curators in this group include:
Curation use: Audience segments consisting of the alternative IDs hosted in an SSP’s database.
Objectives:
Benefits to the ecosystem:
Curation use: Curate sites, data, and targeting for easy workflow and better performance. Use third-party technologies not available in their DSP.
Objectives:
Benefits to the ecosystem:
Curation use: Let marketers leverage high-quality publisher first-party data to reach audiences across the open web.
Objectives:
Benefits to the ecosystem:
Example: Publishers Clearing House
Nothing limits the creativity of the businesses that use curation platforms. As it was built for innovation, they’re free to create new intellectual property and add value to supply in line with their own vision.
In 2025, we predict that brands will increasingly use curation platforms to target their own first-party customer data. Curation platforms offer match rate advantages, with one less data hop across the supply chain. Brands also have more control over their first-party data asset, with less risk of leakage.
In the year ahead, we also expect to see new applications and technologies developed to work with curation platforms that we haven’t even imagined yet!
Hopefully, by narrowing in on some of these use cases, you can see the various ways that programmatic curation platforms help businesses across the open internet, particularly publishers and DSPs.
To really understand the benefits, we have to understand why these uses are emerging. It largely comes down to one thing: efficiency. Curation effectively solves for our ecosystem’s sheer quantity of supply and the inefficiency of how it’s passed on to buyers. Ultimately, curation makes sure that marketers can see the inventory they want to buy and reduces layers of costly data processing.
To be clear, curation platforms on their own don’t make programmatic more efficient. It’s those named above who apply their own tech or expertise who do.
And, it isn’t just the adtech ecosystem that wins, our planet does too. According to Scope3, programmatic advertising generates 215,000 metrics tons of carbon each month. By more effectively matching supply to demand, curation can reduce the amount of data processing across the supply chain, helping to mitigate the environmental impact of advertising.
Curation ultimately shapes both a smarter and greener adtech future. By streamlining the programmatic supply path, reducing costs, and fostering innovation, publishers benefit from improved monetization, buyers benefit from greater efficiency, and we all benefit from lower carbon emissions.
Want to learn more about curation?
As a Product Marketing Manager at Equativ, Jamie is based in our New York City office. He plays a key role in developing go-to-market strategies with a specialized focus on data and addressability topics, helping to support Equativ’s mission of privacy-first, future-ready advertising technologies.
