The trending topic of deal curation has taken the ad industry by storm lately, as media buyers seek to separate the open web’s wheat from the chaff.
But some publishers have griped about their lack of control over how ad tech vendors assemble these curated packages. Others complained that curation deals compete with their own direct sales efforts.
With these misgivings in mind, some enterprising pubs are banding together to curate inventory on their own terms – heeding longstanding calls for greater collective action from publishers. Even media rivals are combining forces to boost their value in the programmatic marketplace.
Atria is one such publisher collective. It launched in February as part of a partnership with the curation and data management platform Permutive. Atria features a mix of UK-based magazine and digital publishers that are generally direct competitors, including Hearst UK, Bauer Media, Immediate, Future, HELLO! and Time Out.
The group had been mulling a collective approach for years in response to growing monetization challenges, due to new standard practices, such as social platforms restricting outbound links and AI-generated search summaries that dampen traffic, said James Walmsley, advertising director at Immediate.
Atria’s publisher-first approach to curation is also a way to protect the value of human-produced journalism, as AI aims to commoditize online content and expertise, Walmsley said. “Atria allows us to have one voice and champion our sector within the market.”
The value of curation
The idea behind Atria is simple: Protect publisher value by giving advertisers exactly what they’ve always said they wanted, namely, high-quality ad inventory from trusted publishers with the requisite scale to justify the investment.
Between the six publishers involved, Atria features 105 different digital media brands. Combined, these publications boast 33 million monthly unique visitors. That’s enough to reach over 60% of the UK online audience, said Doug Green, digital strategy director at Hearst UK.
Atria curates display and video inventory from across these publishers and gives the curated deal IDs priority in their respective SSPs’ programmatic waterfalls, Walmsley said. If there’s no bid for the inventory through an Atria PMP, it’s still sold through open auction.
In addition to monetizing standard display and video, Atria is working to incorporate different high-impact ad units and attention metrics, for which it’s named Adnami as exclusive partner.
Walmsley said Atria’s value was affirmed during a roundtable discussion he had with “key agency people” late last year. “The agencies were all in agreement that they want to spend within premium-quality editorial environments,” he said, but “it’s not always possible because they are time poor.”
Acting individually, publishers prioritize direct and programmatic sales strategies that “[don’t] really align with [agencies’] needs” in the long run, Walmsley said. That’s because it’s time-consuming for agencies to set up so many direct and curated deals.
So the publishers devised Atria as “the simplest and easiest way to buy us at scale,” Walmsley said. Agencies can set up a single PMP or deal ID, he said, and then target “the same audience across all our sites, wherever those consumers turn up.”
Cleaner programmatic
Atria also leans into buyer preferences for more transparency into who’s involved in programmatic deals, Green said.
Buyers regularly ask for curated and higher-quality inventory, he said, but not if they have to set up a mess of deals across several convoluted supply paths and shady resellers. Thus Atria, which provides one path to many premium publishers.
Chris Kane, founder of programmatic supply chain measurement company Jounce Media, also said curation generally helps clean up the rampant bid duplication and redundant supply paths that turn many buyers off of programmatic media.
For one thing, curators can’t create new bid requests for existing publisher inventory, Kane said, so they don’t contribute to bidstream bloat in the same way that programmatic resellers do. Curators also can’t modify the audience and ID parameters contained in the bid requests, he said, which is a tactic resellers often deploy to inflate their own inventory (giving advertisers what they’re asking for, such as particular location or identity data signals, but without delivering value).
And besides, Kane added, curation can’t access open-auction demand because buyers must target specific curated deal IDs. Because of that, curation is about buyers purchasing inventory from sites they affirmatively want to advertise on – which eliminates a ton of concerns about low-quality media or outright made-for-advertising junk on the open web.
Curating audience segments
Another reason publishers are starting to work together on tech products more is because they don’t necessarily have the resources or scale to stand up a viable solution on their own.
In the case of Atria, that’s where Permutive enters the picture. All the publishers involved already worked with Permutive as a DMP. And since Permutive already had access to the publishers’ first-party data, it could curate audience segments without exposing proprietary info to competitors.
Permutive collects a curation fee, which is negotiated with each individual publisher, and the publishers are compensated based on how much of their inventory is purchased as part of any given curated deal. Because of UK competition laws, each Atria publisher has to set its own floor prices for the PMPs, instead of collaborating on a standard price.
Atria offers always-on PMPs as well as some deals tailored to specific buyer demand or seasonal trends. For example, it has dedicated fashion audiences for men’s, women’s and children’s fashion, said Ali Reeves, programmatic business director at Bauer. It also has a dedicated back-to-school fashion audience.
And Atria leans into “avoidance” audiences that provide alternatives to whatever the most in-demand audience of the moment might be, Green said.
For instance, Atria offers a “World Cup avoiders” PMP that circumvents the marketing noise around this year’s tournament. It also helps brands break up the sports audience, Green said. Instead of targeting soccer fans, they can target tennis fans who consume content about the UK’s Wimbledon Championships (which kicked off last week, if perhaps you missed it).
Between when Atria launched in February and the end of May, advertisers ran about a dozen campaigns through its PMPs. Just one of those campaigns – by travel brand Princess Cruises – was completed by the time AdExchanger spoke to Atria. The results were promising, Reeves said, with “40% stronger click-through rates than what they typically see from other upper-funnel campaigns.”
Data visibility
The Atria publishers always had the first-party data needed to curate these segments and prove they perform, said Joe Root, co-founder and CEO of Permutive. But the problem was that “unless they go out and direct sell themselves, that signal disappears when it hits the programmatic pipes.”
Because DSPs are inundated with billions of programmatic bid requests per second, Root said, they use queries-per-second caps to filter bids without cookies or alternative IDs attached. But a curated deal ID serves the same role as any other identifier, he said, which helps ensure that high-quality publisher inventory doesn’t get lost in the sauce.
The deal ID also makes it easier for buyers to measure campaign performance. When advertisers can’t determine whether a publisher’s inventory outperformed other web impressions, Root said, the ad demand flows instead to social walled gardens that provide the reporting data that advertisers ask for.
With those competitive realities in mind, Root added, the Atria publishers have realized that they’re really competing with social media platforms for ad revenue and marketer mind share, not each other. From that perspective, he said, banding together is much more sensible.
The Atria collective is already bringing in new demand from ad agencies that wouldn’t have previously considered direct deals with some of the individual publications, Walmsley said.
“We’re all benefiting,” he said of the publisher squad, “by getting a bigger commitment to spend across non-core and core publications.”
