For all the benefits of programmatic advertising, its implementation has also created its share of bad incentives, writes Aly Nurmohamed, Founder and CEO of Nodals AI. But the rise of curation represents a sea change in ad tech, reducing the industry’s focus on solutions that exclusively serve the buy or sell side.
Curation will be as big, if not bigger, than programmatic itself.
Programmatic was fundamentally built to give advertisers consumer-level expertise. An advertiser can understand who a consumer is and make a decision in real time on buying the ad.
Curation is different because it allows an advertiser to understand everything about an ad placement and make a decision in real time on buying the ad based on all the information on that placement.
Curation has refined programmatic advertising, but the real transformation is yet to come. 2025 is when we’ll see this happen. Scope3 has launched the new Agentic Media Platform, leveraging Agents to understand every ad impression. The Trade Desk recently acquired Sincera, a tool that builds a deep understanding of media owners.
Innovation is pushing curation to its full potential; it won’t just enhance programmatic, it will revolutionise or even replace it. We will see the pace of this increasing rapidly as the industry catches up with the possibilities that curation develops. However, we must first understand the problems we are solving, the impact of curation today, and why publishers are at the root of unlocking possibilities.
The problem with programmatic
Allowing advertisers to understand consumers delivers significant benefits. But it also leads to substantial problems. The biggest is the right consumer sees the right ad, but in the wrong place. A premium ad experience by a high-quality media owner is treated more or less like made-for-arbitrage (MFA) sites or, worse, fraudulent or illegal sites. Different paths to activate an ad are also treated the same, where some may be more economical or effective for advertisers than others. This creates bad incentives for an ecosystem that harms advertisers and quality media owners.
Curation today
Curation means an advertiser can now understand the ad placement they are buying. As we are in the first stages of curation, this is enabling advertisers to do the obvious things that fix the problems of programmatic. Advertisers can now understand and define what type of inventory they buy, how impactful the ads they display are, and the path to access an ad in the desired way.
The opportunity that curation unlocks
What curation actually unlocks is the opportunity for buyers to optimise and take advantage of what’s behind the best parts of an ad placement, rather than simply cutting out the bad things.
To buy ads on Meta, advertisers use Meta’s buying tool Advantage+. The tool allows advertisers to drive their objectives by leveraging everything Meta knows about their ad placements and consumers. Curation will allow advertisers to do the same with media owners on the open internet.
Media owners on the open internet have a rich asset; they build a huge number of powerful signals, which – when combined – provide buyers the ability to truly understand how the inventory will drive their objective. For example, media owners will know the sentiment of the content they are producing, and they will understand their consumers: who they are and what content they have consumed in the past. They will understand the engagement in the content being consumed. They will know how consumers have reacted to advertising in the past. They will know the different types of ad experiences that are available.
By curating at the source, media owners will be able to surface these signals in a way that protects a consumer’s privacy. Buyers will then be able to drive their objectives using those assets in addition to any other signals they possess. The media owner gets insights into how their assets resonate with buyers to tailor them accordingly. This is repeated, creating a more transparent, efficient, and effective cycle that drives outcomes and incentivises media owners to create quality content.
This will all require innovation, but the result will be a level of signal quality far greater than Meta or any other form of digital media – combined with advancements in AI that can process these signals to drive tangible outcomes for buyers.
Who wins and loses with curation
With their powerful signals, the winners in curation will be media owners with deep relationships with consumers. As the data assets they generate get richer, more transparent, efficient, and effective, the more value they drive for advertisers.
The losers are low-quality media owners – they will no longer be able to game the system once it rewards quality on the sell side.
How curation impacts the current ecosystem
Much of the discourse has been around how curation will impact buy-side and sell-side technologies in the open internet. The change curation enables is that buyers and sellers are more intertwined, which means we will stop thinking about technologies as buy and sell side.
We already see this; DSPs are ingesting better signals from publishers and adding media quality as a key criteria. The Trade Desk creating a list of quality publishers for advertisers with their S&P 500+ is a good example. SSPs are enabling buyers to connect more closely with the supply that they manage, with many agencies having built their own marketplaces within SSPs.
As we move forward, the focus on technologies that serve the buy side or the sell side exclusively will reduce, replaced by bringing buyers closer to understanding media owners assets. We will see curation being a key part of the full ad tech ecosystem.
The future
Curation will revolutionise, or replace, programmatic advertising once every advertiser can understand how every media owner’s assets drive their objectives. The foundation is in place, but achieving this potential requires strong partnerships between buyers and sellers, along with significant innovation in the technology that connects them.
That innovation requires new technologies, not simply hacking what has come before it. And in an age of AI, the technological advances that are possible are endless.
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