09 December 2024

The era of curation continues

In summary

• Curation of media inventory has developed recently as a method of improving management and control of media quality, inventory sourcing and addressing identity and data challenges.
• Marketplace environments and managed supply are standardising, as buy and sell side technologies converge.
• Supply curation is now common place when developing inventory sourcing strategies, and governance requirements lead to curated inventory, deals and data as a scalable management solution.

What is curation?

Curation, in the programmatic sense, refers to any inventory source/s procured directly through a publisher or exchange partner. It can take the form of a simple Deal ID purchased on either a programmatic guaranteed, preferred deal or private marketplace basis.

This direct procurement allows for publishers to control price as either a fixed CPM or managed rate, and for advertisers to be accessing proprietary audiences which are unavailable in other buy methods (e.g. Open Exchange). Other forms of curation are designed as ‘Marketplaces’ where inventory from multiple publishers is accessed for broader buying at either an industry category level or, from a curated publisher list.

Marketers were called out by the ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency study last year which discussed the need for more scrutiny and governance on media supply. Louder has long advocated for media and data governance through the Advertiser Media Policy (including data) - a large part of this is now founded in the control of media supply through proper supply strategy assessment. This has provided further leverage for agencies to solve for these demands through greater curation that can meet marketers’ growing governance needs.

Make way for curation, it’s already happening

As a small captive market, Australia has long been a leader in the curation space. Programmatic first mindsets have led the way in creating a thriving curation mindset, where publishers and agencies have quickly advanced towards curated premium inventory packages versus transacting in the open exchange where buying may be considered ‘spray and pray’.

The success of these different approaches are all down to the implementation of the buyer - who may be limited by time, cost or liquidity of inventory or audience.

Adoption of consent management tooling, as a consequence of local legislation changes will lead to limited availability of user consented signals and therefore publisher audiences, impacting programmatic personalisation and retargeting strategies.

The loss of some of these deterministic ‘signals’ in the publisher or sell-side ecosystem is largely being substituted by machine learning features that are designed to predict your next customer, not directly target them.   

Managing and controlling Media Supply is Critical

Curated inventory has led to a clear demand for environments that offer higher quality experiences to impact brand salience in a meaningful way. Streaming has taken over our living rooms, with a continuation of the long-term decline of linear broadcast TV. The catalyst this change has been the adoption of connected TV devices and addressable video products, which has propelled programmatic video advertising demand as more marketers capitalise on changing audience consumption and behaviour.

The Media Holding Companies and Local Media Sales Networks, have been transacting principle media and preferred exchange deals with buyers for a number of years through curated inventory in Marketplaces Technologies or mandated supply paths, sometimes pitched as Supply Path Optimisation (SPO).

Recent changes have accelerated the broader adoption of curated inventory - spurred on by the anticipated loss of third party cookies which was perceived to be a risk to the quality of open exchange buying, degrading publishers audience quality due to signal loss, and forcing a more strategic approach towards managed supply.

Marketplace technologies offer similar impression filters that are available in DSP’s. So, the name of the game now is ‘pre-qualification’ which benefits DSP trading and makes running private inventory less of troubleshooting burden.

Advancing audience strategy and client controls  

As the gap between buy and sell closes, there are changes to the capabilities of agencies (and end-advertisers) which differentiate their abilities and unique value propositions relating to publishers, inventory, audience and data activation.

This trend is the catalyst for exchange (SSP) consolidation, where curated marketplace solutions activate client first party data (e.g LiveRamp) or anonymised identifiers (e.g ID5) allowing targeting alternatives mitigating some of the impacts of cookie or signal deprecation.

Marketplaces offer scaled curation across multiple publishers and inventory sources, as well as different buyer technologies in some use cases. Combined with audiences, this becomes a powerful proposition for buyers and/or agencies to control supply and the price of their inventory (and associated costs for transacting in the open auction vs. guaranteed deals).

This control meets the increasing need for brand governance of media and data supply chains, providing solutions for brands to safely access and avoid risks associated with non compliant inventory, placements or sources that fall outside of an approved media governance policy.

Controlling quality, price and demand ultimately means a refined supply path that uses particular exchanges for either format or audience. This can achieve significant increase net working media, reduce tech costs and improve media quality.

Louder’s recommendations

• Improve your supply quality through Louder’s supply audits and assessment, identify cost savings and establish a baseline for value and quality media supply.

• Improve your overall working media investment through Louder’s supply path analysis, designed to help the success of commercial and operational media strategies.

• Louder managed supply services can complement media governance policy and improve overall quality through curated marketplace environments that are fit for purpose.

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