Curation is all the rage right now. Or at least it’s the thing adtech Twitter is focused on this week.
As we all ponder what curation is and means (the debate on X is intense), here is a chart to consider, courtesy of Lotame, a data collaboration company.
Why This Matters:
This week, Adweek and Marketing Brew both published great articles on curation. Interestingly, the articles also highlighted the varying perspectives on what curation is as a concept.
The Marketing Brew article focuses more on curating inventory by offering advertisers a selective set of premium publishers. See these quotes:
“Curation is generally used to describe a private marketplace where ad-tech companies offer a select list of publishers they’ll serve ads to and audiences they’ll target.”
“Curation has taken the industry by storm… The Trade Desk started pitching a product called SP500+, which includes a hand-selected list of 500 publishers it deems worthy, like the New York Times.”
In contrast, the Adweek article highlights curating both inventory and data, packaging them together to meet specific advertiser goals and KPIs. It also empowers SSPs, in theory. See these quotes:
“Curation tech… creates a package of publishers and data to execute specific buyer goals, like finding highly viewable placements or premium publishers.”
“Advertisers have increasingly looked to SSPs to find data sets to help hone in on inventory, as contextual and publishers’ first-party data have become more important.”
The latter is more like the Lotame chart. We are seeing a discussion about curation (inventory packaging) and programmatic curation (inventory packaging plus data, activated by SSPs).
Experts React:
Here are some of the spicier or interesting takes we’ve seen this week on X about curation:
Our Take:
Here’s how we described curation a couple of months ago:
Curation was previously focused on curating publishers and inventory to support media quality (such as an inclusion list). But that has evolved. This shift is driven by cookie deprecation and advertisers’ increased reliance on first-party data. Curation now refers predominantly to curated deals where selected (curated!) inventory is bundled with first-party data from publishers and packaged into PMPs, then matched to audiences using a Deal ID signal to DSPs.
This approach is more SSP-driven, compared to legacy DSP activation of third-party data and cookies. The goal is to allow advertisers to access high-quality, bundled, customized inventory and audience data from multiple SSPs directly. This should drive improved match rates and better pricing, with better ROI all around.
Does any of this make sense? When will Digiday publish a WTF is Curation article? We need it!
