By Stacy Bohrer, VP of Buyer Development at OpenX
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, future-proofed innovations are more vital than ever. As privacy regulations tighten and audience fragmentation grows, advertisers and publishers need solutions that not only address current challenges but also anticipate the growing demands of tomorrow.
Recently, two key issues have been troubling the ecosystem: addressability and transparency. Signal loss prompted by data protection regulations, cookieless environments, and consumer opt-out has made it more difficult for brands to connect with their target audience effectively, while publishers seeking to drive revenues face obstacles.
The second issue is transparency. Programmatic originated as a way of connecting advertisers with audiences by auctioning available inventory, but in the recent past has seen concerns over bloated supply chains and unintentional inventory. Advertisers can’t always be certain where their ads are being seen and what impact they have. At the same time, unnecessary intermediaries are taking large slices out of publishers’ revenues.
Thankfully, innovative approaches to data are providing solutions to these problems. With data-driven curation, it’s possible to create a more fair and equitable value exchange, where brands can super-charge their advertising performance while publishers get a fair return on their inventory.
Curation matters
To understand how we’ve arrived at data-driven curation, we need to take a step back and look at how supply-side curation has evolved. The role of the SSP is no longer merely as a conduit between publishers and advertisers where available inventory is auctioned. While SSPs have always had close relationships with publishers, by consistently innovating with technology and gaining a better understanding of advertisers’ needs, they’ve evolved and added significant value to their offering.
One of the ways in which this has manifested is the principle of inventory curation. SSPs have long enabled buyers to create custom lists, focusing on the specific domains, websites, and other digital inventory that best align with their brand. This gives them transparency over the ad placements they are bidding on, while third-party data sources accessed through a DSP can also enable them to add precision to their targeting and boost addressability. And yet, these targeting capabilities are just scratching the surface of what’s currently possible.
The next step: data-driven curation
Differentiated SSPs are taking curation further, layering on data to enable even more effective targeting for buyers while giving publishers the chance to capitalize on incremental demand programmatically.
Data-driven curation goes beyond simple inventory curation to open up behavioral and demographic information to buyers, as well as insights into purchase intent, helping them enrich their own first-party customer data. It gives buyers a chance to achieve superior campaign performance by leveraging their highly relevant first-party data to reach audiences much more effectively across whichever digital environments they may be frequenting.
By taking an audience-first approach, rather than an inventory-first approach, advertisers can create multiple audience segments and then target these segments wherever they happen to be across the open web, CTV, and other digital environments rather than creating lists of digital inventory based around specific topics and genres.
For example, data-driven curation could allow a cosmetics brand to create audience segments consisting of consumers that use a specific mascara and reach them on a streaming platform or a travel site vs. beauty-focused outlets. With inventory curation, the brand would have been limited to placing ads within content of a certain genre such as a beauty retailer’s website, which would be contextually relevant, but would likely also be an overly competitive environment that also manages to miss key audiences.
The benefits of data-driven curation
With data-driven curation, creating highly targeted audience segments for every campaign is easily achievable for advertisers. By utilizing their own first-party customer data, enriched with second-party publisher data as well as trusted third-party data sources to add further context, brands can scale their audiences with confidence.
With refined targeting and improved ad relevance for each campaign, advertisers create stronger connections with their consumers, driving engagement and boosting conversions. According to X, 78% of marketers indicate using data in audience targeting and segmentation has significantly improved performance and efficiency across their campaigns.
Building a thriving marketplace for the future
While the complexity of the digital advertising landscape means that solving the issues of addressability and transparency isn’t simple, data-driven curation provides answers to a number of challenges.
Advertisers who embrace differentiated curation tools will gain a strategic advantage in the programmatic marketplace, while publishers will be able to unlock the full value of their inventory, drive incremental revenue, and strengthen their direct relationships with buyers. In the end, a programmatic industry built on consented data that still allows for precise targeting will lead to higher returns for publishers, relevant experiences for consumers, and increased ROAS for advertisers.
