Curation: The Holy Matrimony of Data & Inventory

Curation is not a novel concept in the digital advertising world, but in an increasingly privacy-compliant ad landscape, the need for curated marketplaces is more pressing than ever. 

What are curated marketplaces?

Let's think of these as an assortment of premium, handpicked seller deals, more pristine than what’s available in the larger programmatic marketplace, owing to their closer proximity to the supply source. It’s this farm-to-table appeal of curated marketplaces that makes them a critical component to the media buying circus, for both buyers and sellers alike.

How do they work?

Deals in a curated marketplace appear to be similar to any standard deal in the buyers’ DSP and are also traded as such except, these deals are facilitated by certified value-added curators that augment these curations with sophisticated, data-rich signals.

How do curated deals decrease reliance on ID-centric targeting?

ElementalTV’s VISTA is an excellent example of a data-centric, publisher certified curator that brings together key capabilities of a DMP, DSP and SSP together to build a concoction powered by first-party, contextual, and cognitive data signals. 
Our privacy-focused audience insights fuse together multiple, holistic views of identity, which go far beyond traditional audience identifiers.

Privacy-compliant, brand-safe, ID-less - what else makes curated marketplaces cooler than the dumb ol’ open exchange?

PMPs/Curated deals have minimal intermediaries and additional hops. As anyone native to the programmatic buying space would know that with lesser layers, comes more transparency and efficiency.  Owing to these lean mechanics of curated marketplaces, it’s definitely much easier for buyers to monitor and optimize against holistic measures such as total spend, performance and other KPIs across campaigns, but it’s also a boon to publishers who can better merchandise their valuable inventory to buyers through the power of curation.

The VISTA Audience Smart Curation engine provides buyers with exceptional premium inventory curated by algorithms looking into the contextual aspects of what the audience is watching, along with the behavior and intent signals of privacy-safe data sources.