
The AdTech Curation Landscape
Welcome to the first of two articles where we’ll be discussing the the state of curation in the AdTech industry, why it’s so important, and what we feel can be done to improve it’s efficacy and efficiency for both publishers and media buyers.
Proctor & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard kicked off 2017 with an incendiary speech at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting that, among other things, called out a “crappy media supply chain”; more recently he followed up these sentiments by musing at this year’s ANA Media Conference that “the only currency that matters is sales dollars” – a veiled reference to the continued struggle marketers face in effectively measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
The man responsible for the brand-building disciplines of one of the world’s biggest advertisers laid bare the concerns of most of the industry. As programmatic bid volume grows, today’s ad execs grapple with supply paths so convoluted they almost require a degree in rocket science to decipher. They also face existential threats such as signal loss, and the ever-present shadow of the widely referenced AdTech tax. Combined, these create the perfect storm of inefficient media buying and lost opportunity.
At the same time, programmatic advertising’s impact on the environment is increasingly under fire. Digital technology is responsible for 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, much of this fuelled by the trillions of bid opportunities generated every day by programmatic trading systems.
Curation – a partial cure
Curation has emerged in recent years as a welcome tonic to the challenge of sifting the wheat from the chaff in terms of controlling the quality and relevance of inventory and enabling campaigns optimised around preferred supply and audience data. It has also been leveraged successfully to ‘shape’ traffic based on the presence (or absence) of preferred non-cookie IDs in publishers’ impressions.
Some commentators recently questioned whether publishers are the ultimate beneficiaries of demand activation through curation. However, its adoption continues to grow for good reason: it offers a flexible mechanism by which media buyers can test and burn implementation approaches around data intelligence and non-cookie measurement.
More than that it could be argued that the data injection use case has flourished precisely because publishers have struggled to develop their own first party data monetisation strategies quickly enough; sometimes this is down to their own inertia but it’s also because the tech solutions tabled to assist with the task have not delivered the functionality required to do the job properly. As a result, the smarter publishers in the ecosystem have leaned into curation, whether directly or through a curation partner.
But for all its advantages, within curation as a practice, there is a signal loss that isn’t much talked about: the obscuring of curated bid requests to the point that they don’t make it past the first post of buyer decisioning. We’ve seen instances where 90% and more of these requests are cast into the ether, never to be given a second glance by a downstream bidder after they are bundled into a private marketplace (PMP). The net result: publishers miss out on selling inventory at a potentially higher price point while media buyers lose relevant opportunities for advertising campaigns.
Clearly this is bad news for marketing budget schedules and campaign performance; it also equates to astronomical amounts of wasted computing power as billions of bid requests flow from ‘zombie deals’ in search of third-party DSP campaigns that never stand a chance of delivering. This adds to the proliferation of irresponsible marketing practices that are a major factor in digital media’s contribution to global carbon emissions.
Getting more from curation
Bedrock Platform was born out of a belief that these challenges could be overcome and takes inspiration from the various companies already making inroads in this field. Curation specialist Fern Potter at MultiLocal Media for example details the active measures required to combat the mountain of wasteful bids bouncing between programmatic platforms. In response we have designed a solution that allows customers to get the best from curation, without the downsides.