At this year’s Programmatic I/O in New York, Gil Sommer, VP of Global Product at OpenX, delivered an insightful presentation titled “Keeping up With Curation: The Evolution of Supply-Side Curation and Where It’s Headed.”

Curation in programmatic advertising has been gaining momentum ever since OpenX built the largest independent sell-side identity graph in 2018. In the ensuing years, we have been committed to innovating for our partners with impressive results — driving efficiency and better outcomes for publishers, advertisers, DSPs, and data partners.

So, how does the market define curation today? According to AdExchanger, “it involves matching a buyer’s first-party customer data to a publisher’s first-party audience data to create private marketplaces (PMPs).” Other industry trades like Digiday and AdWeek describe it similarly: creating customized data and supply portfolios, often leveraging PMPs to deliver specific audience segments. 

Essentially, at the core of these definitions is data — whether first-party or third-party — and a supply of premium inventory. But OpenX takes it a step further.

OpenX’s take on curation

While definitions may vary across the adtech industry, we have a broader and more dynamic view of curation. For OpenX, curation is about merging a robust supply-side identity graph with premium data and inventory across all channels. It’s not just about gathering data, either; it’s about layering on identity-based precision, enabling the targeting of the right audiences with premium, brand-safe inventory for our clients.

Sommer outlined five key factors that make up a strong curation platform like OpenX.

1. A people-based identity graph
   This is the foundation of a scalable, effective curation solution. With identity-based targeting, advertisers can:
   • Target with precision (ensuring the right people are reached)
   • Increase audience reach and scale
   • Optimize performance through campaign insights
     
     
2. Premium inventory
   Curation requires the most direct and efficient path to inventory that is both brand-safe and free of made-for-advertising (MFA) inventory.
   
   
3. Advanced curation tools
   A good curation platform needs tools — whether through a UI or API — that allow users to build audiences, apply targeting layers, and activate deal IDs for better campaign execution.
   
   
4. Cookieless environments
   As the industry shifts towards alternative addressable solutions, the ability to operate effectively in cookieless environments is essential. With much of media today inherently cookieless, solutions must leverage multi-signal onboarding and sophisticated models to maintain addressability.
   
   
5. Full interoperability with DSPs
   Lastly, OpenX ensures full interoperability with demand-side platforms (DSPs), allowing advertisers to activate curated deals within their DSP of choice.

The evolution of supply-side curation

Sommer walked attendees through the evolution of curation (which OpenX used to refer to as supply-side targeting). While previous iterations focused on straightforward aggregation of high-quality supply, modern curation has evolved to include sophisticated targeting and data capabilities. 

Today, our data-driven curation platform takes precision to the next level by offering both pre-built and customized solutions. This allows brands to seamlessly activate their first-party data or tap into third-party data from one of our 250+ data partners. 

The future, according to Sommer, is even more ambitious. OpenX is focused on how curation can drive better advertiser results. To do so, the team is building solutions to sift through the enormous scale of ad requests — upwards of 500 billion daily — and identify those most valuable to a buyer’s campaign.

Curation as a solution for the digital advertising industry

Curation is rapidly emerging as a powerful solution in the digital advertising industry, delivering tailored benefits for both publishers and advertisers. For publishers, curation offers better monetization opportunities by bringing relevant, high-value ad requests to the forefront. Advertisers, on the other hand, benefit from more precise targeting, higher ROI, and the ability to scale campaigns without incurring unnecessary costs.

Importantly, data-driven curation is a useful tool for DSPs as well, as it improves the quality of ad requests that are sent to them. Through supply-side curation, DSPs can better optimize bidding strategies, reducing inefficiencies and improving performance across the board. 

“We believe that if you take all those hundreds of billions of ad requests a day and train models to understand the performance of multiple characteristics, you’ll eventually find the ad requests that are valuable … and then send those to the DSP for activation by the advertiser,” said Sommer. “So, we think that curation is really a good solution for the entire industry.”

The future of data-driven curation tools

In closing, Sommer left the audience with a forward-looking message: “While curation has made significant strides in recent years, there is still much more to come from OpenX, including continued advancements in data, identity, and the ability to activate premium inventory at scale.”

As Sommer put it, “Curation is really just the tip of the iceberg.” For OpenX, it’s a game-changing innovation that benefits everyone across the value chain — from publishers to advertisers and curation partners — and it’s only getting better from here.