The ad-tech world’s newest buzzword is ‘curation’

Digital advertising companies are pitching white-glove services in an effort to shed the perception that they place ads indiscriminately across the expanse of the internet.

Programmatic ad-tech companies including The Trade Desk, Xandr, Index Exchange, and OpenX are pitching advertisers on so-called curated services that include bespoke packages of web publishers, specialized software, and tailor-made algorithms.

The pitch of access to a smaller, more premium internet comes as the digital advertising industry faces increasing scrutiny from advertisers over reports that show billions in wasted ad dollars and ads that run alongside controversial, explicit content. And it’s a shift from these companies’ traditional businesses, which previously centered on selling advertisements across the open web to get the scale that advertisers often seek.

“The market is sort of reverting to curation, saying, ‘Oh, I’ll take these packages and I’ll give up some ability to drive outcomes,’” Adam Heimlich, CEO of ad-tech company Chalice AI, told Marketing Brew. “It’s because algorithms have so consistently driven people to bad content and privacy violations.”

More art than science

Curation is more of a concept than a specific product, and while it has not yet been defined by the IAB’s standard-setting organization, it’s 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. Those lists can be customized to either target or avoid certain publishers or audiences.

In many ways, curation looks a lot like the ad networks of yore, which bundled different groups of publishers and promised perks like unique data or exclusive inventory, Matthew McIntyre, SVP of product strategy at the GroupM agency Choreograph, explained. Consider him hyper-aware of the rebrand: he created a Chrome browser extension that replaces the word “curation” with “ad network.”

Rebrand or not, curation has taken the industry by storm. Earlier this year, 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. Yahoo, meanwhile, unveiled a product last year that promises a “direct path” to “curated, premium, MFA-free publishers” like News Corp and ESPN, according to its website.

On the supply side, companies like Xandr, Index Exchange, and OpenX are all pitching advertisers the option of accessing curated lists of publishers and partners through them. OpenX began referencing the phrase “curation” in its marketing materials over the summer, and currently sells advertisers packages that include “up to 10,000 domains,” each one vetted and including “zero MFA,” Stacy Bohrer, VP of buyer development at OpenX, told Marketing Brew.

In early October, Chalice AI announced a curation tool called Chalice PMPs, which, Heimlich said, uses data from ad-tech companies Sincera and LiveRamp to target publishers, their webpages, and audiences.

At an advertising conference in September, James Trott, senior director of global addressable media at the Coca-Cola Company, said the beverage giant has leaned into curation as a way to mitigate “the risk of quality loss by ensuring that your minimum standards for programmatic media are respected,” Digiday reported.

Johnathan Barnes, founder of ad-tech company Population Science, told us that he pivoted his software business from traditional media-buying to pitching a curation service in June. Engagement on his LinkedIn ads increased fivefold after he changed the messaging in the ads to focus on curation, he told Marketing Brew.

Same as it ever was

The shift to curation is something of an antithesis to traditional programmatic advertising, which has historically placed an emphasis on targeting audiences across the open web rather than specifying which websites ads will actually run on.

“The promise of programmatic always was one portal into the entire web to make media buying as efficient as possible,” Barnes said.

That promise has brought with it some issues for advertisers. At least $10 billion worth of ad budgets were spent on so-called made-for-advertising (MFA) sites from September 2022 to January 2023, according to a report published by the Association of National Advertisers last year, and while the industry has worked to establish standards aimed at limiting the inclusion of these types of sites in ad inventory, the ad-tech auditing firm Adalytics found that, last January, plenty of ads continued to run on MFA sites.

While funneling money to more premium publishers could limit advertiser exposure to some less-than-quality inventory, it could also make it harder for smaller publishers to make money, Matt Barash, an ad exec who last worked as SVP of the Americas at Index Exchange, said.

“Curation is another nail in the coffin of the open web,” Barash told Marketing Brew via text. “A select cohort of publishers stand to benefit while the long tail gets iced out of the action.”

And curation alone may also not be a silver bullet for industry concerns about inventory quality. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that even reputable publishers like Forbes and Gannett appeared to monetize content that wasn’t what advertisers were expecting.

For now, though, it remains unclear whether the hype about curation has translated into advertising spend.

“I think there’s probably more discussion from the industry than there is interest yet from clients,” Bryan Sherman, EVP of global media CX and investment at the S4 agency Monks, told Marketing Brew. “If you want to guarantee you are going to run certain dollars in certain places, this is a great way of doing that, but not every brand has that mandate, and for those that do, we would still want to balance that with an overarching media plan.”

Update 10/16/24: This story has been updated to better reflect the makeup of SP500+.