Brian Chisholm, SVP of Strategic Partnerships at OpenX, shares what brands, agencies, retailers, and data owners should look for in a curation platform.

What is curation?

Curation is the hottest trend in programmatic; one of the few without a three-letter acronym associated with it. In fact, 2024 may just be the “year of curation.”  

OpenX pioneered the concept of curation (what we formerly called supply-side targeting), which we began building in 2018 and formally launched in 2019. In doing so, we brought to market the first-ever supply-side identity graph and enabled data to be matched and activated at the supply level.  

Over the past six years, we have continued to invest heavily in curation, and our platform has become a powerful tool for more than 50 partners like Attain, Captify, and Audigent to activate and measure their data across premium supply and for buyers to target with greater control, precision, and scale.

We define curation as the strategic combination of audience targeting, advanced inventory selection, and campaign measurement through DSP-agnostic deal IDs provided to advertisers by SSPs and their curation partners. 

Curation is a fast-moving space, and the downsides of waiting to get involved are only mounting. Here are five essential capabilities that your SSP curation partner must have to ensure success — whether you’re a brand, agency, data owner, retail media network, or curation house.

1. A people-based identity graph

First-party data is the lifeblood of sophisticated advertising businesses. This includes commerce-focused partners who leverage their valuable first-party data to target, measure, and optimize retail media focused campaigns. To do this well, curation partners need the ability to match partner data sets on first-party match keys such as hashed emails, names, address, and phone numbers. Without that capability, you can’t target and measure outcomes at the person level.  

When we built our identity graph more than six years ago, we empowered partners to apply their first-party data directly to OpenX’s 210 million monthly unique users and access our premium supply. Now, we enable partners to match on those first-party match keys, which maximizes match rates and helps buyers find more of their valuable users on OpenX. Platforms that rely heavily on third-party party cookies for matching data will be challenged to maintain addressability as signal loss continues to erode.

2. Premium, direct inventory

This is table stakes for curation, yet not every SSP has the premium footprint across all formats — especially in CTV. There are only a few SSPs that have built the scaled, direct, and optimized supply footprint over the last decade and a half. This direct, premium supply is what gives buyers the ability to target with precision, achieve their KPIs, and increase working media. 

OpenX is trusted as a direct partner by the world’s largest publishers, and third-party certification by respected organizations like the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) consistently reflects that. In fact, our TV by OpenX initiative is centered around ensuring that we only sell premium and direct inventory within our CTV offering. TV by OpenX makes it simple for curation partners to scale addressable audiences in biddable CTV supply across only premium, glass-on-wall CTV publishers.

3. Advanced curation tools

People-based targeting and premium supply are critical drivers of performance for buyers, but there are additional tools that curation partners should seek out to drive even greater results. Tools that can further refine and optimize supply and placements can provide meaningful additional performance on top of audience targeting and measurement alone. 

OpenX has built a robust set of features to help our curation partners and buyers drive additional performance. Advanced inventory curation and optimization features, deal troubleshooting, and the ability to distribute audiences directly to publishers for prioritized 1:1 PMPs are examples of advanced tools that can drive meaningful results for partners and buyers. Building on our history of innovation, we’re currently testing new outcomes-based solutions that leverage AI and machine learning.

4. Future-proofed solutions

Whether the third-party cookie is deprecated in one fell swoop or gradually over time, the result will be the same — continued signal loss for buyers and sellers alike. This signal loss is felt even more acutely by audience targeters for whom reaching a smaller set of highly valuable users is critical. So, for curators, it’s imperative that they work with platforms that can preserve addressability in the face of signal loss headwinds. Identifying high-performing audiences is only a viable tactic to the extent that you can actually find them. 

OpenX has built a unique activation system that makes multiple non-cookie based signals and IDs in the bidstream interoperable through our proprietary ID (OAID). This approach provides our curation partners with future-proofed addressability in the substantial cookieless environments that exist today, and in any version of the cookieless future.

5. People-based measurement

Matching and targeting on first-party data is only half the battle. To extract the full value of first-party data, buyers need to be able to measure outcomes based on those same first-party users. Curation partners should look for platforms that can not only match on a first-party data basis, but then also share back in real time those anonymous first-party users who were exposed in the campaign.  

OpenX’s platform enables curation partners to receive a near real-time feed of IDs exposed in the campaign based on our proprietary people-based ID. That means curation partners can measure the real world impact of their campaigns and optimize them for better-performing inventory and audiences.

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Curation is a powerful tool for marketers, publishers, and data owners — one that OpenX has been innovating for the better part of a decade. If you’re a brand or agency, retail media network, data owner, or curation house, reach out to deals@openx.com to learn more about how curation can help you achieve your KPIs and grow your business.