Curation and beyond with Bedrock Platform

Our last post outlined an issue that, while not widely discussed, plays a big role in undermining curation as it stands today – disappearing bid requests. Let’s unpack that in a bit more detail.

Misaligned strategic priorities

In effect, so called ‘zombie deals’ are a result of overzealous filtering of the bidstream by the DSP. When a curated deal impression is distributed to a nominated DSP seat, there are many factors that determine whether it survives the first level of bidstream filtering or ‘shaping’ – and these are not necessarily related to whether the impression passes campaign targeting checks.

The identity of the DSP’s parent company could be a consideration for example, along with that organisation’s strategic motivations in relation to its own preferred ID vendor(s) being present (or not present) in the bid request, its (frequently predetermined) preferred supply paths, the data vendor partnerships it has in place – and quite possibly the position of the moon and maybe the sun on any given day.… We jest, but you get the point. A combination of one or more of these factors might see campaigns that are targeting certain curated deals deprioritised – i.e. they have an artificially low bid rate for no discernible reason.

For media buyers, this restriction of curated bid requests means that setting parameters to make campaigns and their related delivery information (line items) eligible for a PMP is no guarantee that ads will appear in publisher ad slots in anything like the schedule or frequency set out in the media plan. As a result of this under delivery, overall campaign performance is often poor.

The effect described above is a pronounced example of a clear mismatch between the platform’s wider strategic goals and the objectives of the media buyer using the system. At the same time, it adds to the industry’s sustainability issue by flooding the bidstream with bid requests that will not be actioned.

As detailed in our first blog, these disappearing deals don’t do anyone any favours. They also add to the proliferation of irresponsible marketing practices that are a major factor in digital media’s not insignificant contribution to global carbon emissions.

Closed Loop Curation

Looking for a new approach to curating quality inventory and quality data, we came up with Closed Loop Curation (CLC), a module that sits bundled on top of our demand side (bidder) infrastructure for our customers to utilise.

The way we see it, the standard reliance on two or more disparate systems (DSP and SSP) trying to speak to each other in different languages often leads to campaign delivery being plagued by go-slows. In contrast, the concept of CLC is based on giving customers the benefits of curation without compromising on the speed of scaling campaign delivery – it’s similar to a company offering both a publisher and buy side ad server that can use the same internally tracked ‘redirect’ impression to report equally accurate impression numbers on both sides of the campaign execution (buyer and publisher).

We’ve designed CLC into our system to provide the basic benefits that standard curation offers, such as filtering traffic based on quality include lists, or excluding traffic based on brand safety block lists. In addition, CLC allows our customers to engage in responsible marketing, setting up campaigns and line items that deliver quickly against curated deals while being sustainable because they remove the wastage of massive zombie bid distribution across the internet.

We admit that having a curation module as part of a demand side stack is probably a relatively novel concept – until now curating supply against specific data signals was a service usually delivered by an SSP.

The benefits of being buy side

We see no reason why the powerful functionality offered by curation can’t exist on the buy side. What’s more, being able to curate on the demand side delivers some distinct advantages. Quality inventory can be curated from multiple SSP sources (not all SSPs resell each other!) for example, while different data signal types, fragmented across more than one upstream vendor, can be curated into a single downstream deal; this opens new possibilities for measuring and A/B testing the various combinations, as well as the subsequent reporting required to track media investment by publisher for these differing data options.

Bedrock Platform CLC also enables users to filter the bidstream in a way that is highly customised to their needs – and to do this on a self-serve basis (rather than submitting development requests to the provider). Putting control in the hands of the user allows them to shape their curation activity, making tasks such as testing different non-cookie ID options to see which performs better much more straightforward – a level of flexibility and control that has so far been missing.

Because of our buy side set up, Bedrock Platform enables media buyers’ campaigns and line items to exist within the same system and network setup as the curated deals they need to deliver against, thereby removing the pain points of signal and bid loss, along with under-delivery of deal-targeted campaigns.

At the same time customers can be confident they are adopting a responsible solution when it comes to the planet.