Curation will reimagine the advertising ecosystem
Opinion
Curated environments allow publishers to monetise their first-party data more directly, while the buying process is simplified without putting consumers’ privacy at risk.
The digital advertising landscape is experiencing a significant shift, with marketers seeking new ways to reach the right audiences at scale amid continuing audience signal loss.
Right now, at least 70% of the internet is ID-less. This shift has had a massive impact on publishers — because 70% of their inventory is now under-monetised without audience information IDs provided.
Meanwhile, advertisers are only able to bid on 30% of consumers. Reach has collapsed while CPMs have increased. Google’s plan to let consumers opt out of cookies in Chrome will only accelerate this signal loss.
This reality has renewed interest in the concept of curation, where open web audiences and inventory are pooled together and made available to buyers via grouped private deals and audience segments informed by publishers’ first-party data.
Curation has been rapidly growing in interest and if there was any doubt that it was here to stay, its future became even more evident with Google’s recent introduction of a curation capability within Ad Manager.
How much of an impact is curation going to have on the future of digital advertising? And what does it mean for scalability and collaboration across the ecosystem?
Google cookie U-turn: Industry is ready to move on, leaders say
Curating a better ecosystem
The idea of curation isn’t an entirely new one within digital advertising. In fact, it mirrors the early days of the web, when ad networks in the pre-programmatic era would aggregate publisher inventory and bundle into endemic categories, selling on a blind or translucent basis.
The process of packaging multi-publisher inventory in years past provided little yield. However, it did provide a way for sellers to move remnant inventory that took up the majority of their capacity and often came with a revenue guarantee the publisher could bank on.
There was value for the buyer, too, as it gave the campaign reach and minimised the number of buying points in a fragmented landscape. They also provided operational efficiencies for the buyer when trafficking was a heavy operational burden.
Ad networks continued to further innovate on this idea, each adding their own “secret sauce” to improve performance or audience-targeting capabilities. But the yield lift to publishers remained low. The arms race was on and the power balance sat squarely in the hands of the buy side.
As agencies began to rely more heavily on ad networks to fulfil their campaigns, brands began questioning the content their ads were adjacent to. At the same time, editorial teams at premium publishers faced similar concerns around the quality of the ads running on their sites.
These past challenges have provided valuable lessons as the industry approached curation. Today’s curation is being designed to create value for publishers, advertisers and consumers alike.
With the decay of cookies and third-party data marketplaces, curation will focus heavily on first-party data signals, such as publisher IDs, cohorts and contextual data — bringing durability and scalability to this media activation strategy.
First-party data is the new gold — don’t hand it over to just anyone
Entering the golden generation
First-party data has become increasingly important with the gradual fading away of third-party signals.
According to Permutive data, almost three-quarters of publishers already see a strong demand for their first-party audiences from both direct and programmatic channels.
Historically, the challenge was executing these private marketplaces at the same scale that was previously possible with audience-targeting capabilities within the demand-side platform.
This success wouldn’t have been possible in the past, as the programmatic pipes only supported 1:1 private marketplaces between buyer and seller. Managing dozens, or even hundreds, of deal IDs is an impossible task for the buyer.
But, thanks to innovations by supply-side platforms, this is changing.
Private marketplaces have always enabled publishers to make their first-party signals available programmatically. Buyers are increasingly able to activate their campaigns across multiple sites and don’t need to form direct private marketplace deals with each publisher — something that can be time-consuming.
Instead, publisher first-party audiences and inventory can be activated with a single synthetic deal ID in a matter of seconds and in a privacy-first manner.
For publishers, aside from the more effective basis for collaboration, these curation-backed environments help fill the revenue gap left in open marketplace revenue. While doing this, it still ensures ad quality, mitigates channel conflict and maintains pricing controls.
A world of reimagination
It’s still early days for curation in its latest form, with less than 15% of publishers having tested curated marketplaces. Google entering the market with its curation solution signals a maturing marketplace.
Wider adoption of curation will pave the way for creating a safer, more efficient and cleaner open web, benefiting the entire ecosystem.
Publishers can monetise their first-party data through more direct pathways with advertisers, ensuring they capture as much demand as possible. Advertisers can access inventory and audiences across publishers without having to form individual private marketplaces with every single one of them.
Plus, consumers benefit from more relevant advertising without their privacy or safety being put at risk.
Much of the industry still struggles to understand how to navigate a world without third-party signals successfully. Curation is perfectly placed to help solve some of these issues and reimagine the open web landscape as safer and cleaner for advertisers, publishers and consumers.
Elizabeth Brennan is general manager, advertising, at Permutive