The IAB Tech Lab is officially rebranding its Seller Defined Audiences curation spec as “Curated Audiences,” its CEO Anthony Katsur confirmed to AdExchanger on Wednesday.
When a buzzword like “curation” captures the ad industry’s imagination, it only makes sense for a marketing trade org to lean into that branding. And the Tech Lab has been watching the sell-side curation craze take the industry by storm over the past year.
Meanwhile, its own curation framework – which is still lagging in adoption after nearly three years in market – has been sitting underappreciated in the corner.
Katsur toyed with the idea of rebranding Seller Defined Audiences (SDAs) to spur wider adoption in a LinkedIn article last month.
The article was Katsur’s reaction to the idea that curation was something new and proprietary to DMPs and SSPs, he said. In reality, the practice has existed in various forms for the past 20-plus years, stretching back to the days when ad networks ruled digital advertising.
Katsur was also responding to industry members who had petitioned the IAB Tech Lab to release a standard definition of curation and a framework for selling curated audiences through programmatic pipes.
Katsur pointed out that the Tech Lab had already done so, highlighting its SDA spec, content and audience taxonomies, Data Transparency Standard and OpenRTB SupplyChain object. Taken together, these standards enable the creation, selling and measurement of curated inventory.
However, Katsur conceded that not enough industry players have adopted the Tech Lab’s framework, particularly SDAs. In his LinkedIn article, he quipped that “we should rename this ‘Curated Audiences’ to attract attention” and added, “I’m not joking” (emphasis his).
He obviously meant it.
But is the nomenclature “seller-defined” really hampering SDA adoption? Katsur certainly believes so, based on conversations he’s had with the buy side of the ecosystem.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have branded it ‘seller-defined,’” he said, “because a lot of buyers are like, ‘I want to define the audience. I want to define the package.’”
Therefore, calling it Curated Audiences is “some basic product marketing” that could spur wider buy-in from the industry at large, he said.
“And there’s probably a little bit of work we need to do in the framework itself,” he added. But what exactly that work will entail awaits more input from the industry.
