The ad tech industry is great at creating new buzzwords, but less successful at defining them.
Take curation: Every major ad tech platform claims to do it, but there are conflicting definitions of what it is or how it works.
It’s like we all agreed to make “personal mobility devices” and all came up with different solutions, building skateboards, bicycles, cars, airplanes and boats.
One exasperated publisher recently told a reporter they thought curation was “turds rolled in glitter.” I wonder if they got a skateboard when they were expecting an airplane.
But curation is fundamentally different than the premium ad networks of the past. It’s more than a buzzword; it’s the next great technological leap for advertising.
Applying curation to advertising
Curation in advertising is like curation in art. There are many artists (publishers) making a lot of art (content). It’s up to a curator to help patrons (advertisers) find the best artists making the best art.
Today, there are more than 200 million active websites, with people and companies registering around 250,000 new domain names every day. Most of the world is now connected to the internet, largely through their mobile devices. People on average spend nearly 4 hours per day on their phones. Collectively, we create and consume hundreds of exabytes of content daily.
Some publishers make objectionable content that brands don’t want to advertise next to, and some publishers are just producing junk – made-for-advertising websites that nobody visits.
Facing this cacophony of data signals, advertisers want curators to filter through the traffic to find them available ad units that fit their defined criteria. That might be as specific as only advertising on the internet’s 100 biggest publishers or as broad as buying ads that target audiences based on location, interests or demographics.
On the other side of the equation, publishers are sitting on a treasure trove of first-party, privacy-compliant consumer data. Curation is a good way for publishers to regain some control in the ad tech equation, sharing (or deciding not to share) their data in return for higher CPMs.
Is curation a premium ad network?
Many years ago, ad tech platforms built premium ad networks, which allowed advertisers to only place ads on a select group of digital publishers.
Curation is a similar idea, but it offers more.
The main difference lies in approach: Curation prioritizes tailored combinations from diverse sources, while premium networks focus on exclusive, high-value inventory. What’s more, artificial intelligence and machine learning models allow ad tech platforms to more efficiently curate an advertiser’s audience within that higher-value inventory, offering even more precision.
The value of curation
Once it’s standardized, curation represents the next step in advertising technology. It will eventually permeate everything we do.
In the future, people will consume fewer but better ads. Artificial intelligence will flow through nearly every aspect of advertising, with the fundamental tenets of curation driving its decisions: AI will interpret customer data, find the customer as they consume content from premium publishers and place personalized ads in front of them at the right moment.
When we succeed in building that, we’ll probably need to invent a new buzzword – something like “dynamic curation.”
Until then, we’re stuck with curation: a powerful concept with a squishy definition.
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