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Yahoo is jumping on the curation bandwagon.
The digital media company will work with a host of partners to offer more white-glove advertising services in an effort to help advertisers reach their intended audiences and avoid some of the pitfalls of programmatic advertising, it announced at CES this week.
So what? After several years of bad press about “made for advertising” inventory and wasted budgets, curation has become the buzzword du jour in the ad-tech world, as seemingly every ad-tech company seeks to sever its connection with the open web (aka where all those ads end up).
- Last year, The Trade Desk introduced a product called SP500+, which it describes as a hand-selected list of 500 publishers including the New York Times.
- Supply-side platforms like Xandr and Index Exchange have also pitched their own curated lists.
In 2023, Yahoo’s demand-side platform rolled out Yahoo Backstage, an offering that promises “direct access” to publishers like News Corp and ESPN.
This week, Yahoo said it would build on those efforts, announcing partnerships with ad-tech analytics company Jounce, contextual advertising company Peer39, and ad-tech emissions tracker Scope3, all with the intention of helping its advertisers avoid the junk of the internet. Advertisers can, if they wish, lean on these partners to weed out programmatic resellers offering lower quality and “made for advertising” inventory.
“This empowers the buyer to decide what inventory they want, and they’re in control of creating their own packages,” Adam Roodman, GM of Yahoo’s DSP, told Marketing Brew.
The streaming wars: The company also announced a partnership with Roku that will offer its advertisers direct biddable access to Roku’s inventory without going through a supply-side company.
As part of the partnership, Roodman said that Roku will adopt Yahoo’s identity graph, ConnectID, which Roodman said is a differentiator compared to larger players like The Trade Desk and Google.
According to the analytics firm Sincera, Yahoo’s ID graph is in second place behind Google’s in terms of programmatic transactions.