The rise of curation may have been seen as another tool in digital advertising’s arsenal, but now its true value is being recognised as an operational system for managing the complexities of media buying. Because this is needed if programmatic is to deliver on the promises of speed, simplification and scale that we were sold. The winners will be those offerings that prioritise interoperability, unified workflows and signals, orchestrated decision-making and operational intelligence as the panacea to today’s bloated stacks, inefficiencies and fragmented environments. And this is where curation delivers.
Going beyond deal creation
If your understanding of curation is an instrument to create deals, target audiences, route inventory and set campaigns live, then no wonder you see it as a tool. Yes, it may work (up to a point), but this thinking fails to embrace the totality it delivers. Because true curation is multi-dimensional, which means any system must be too. Campaign planning, activation and optimisation must all be in place for it to work. Ultimately, success comes down to having a central intelligence layer that pulls all the elements of curation together, makes it work effectively and guides decision-making.
Yes, it all starts with access to data from multiple SSPs and data businesses. But it’s then about how you use it. This needs to encompass forecasting across the data and inventory, building targeted audiences and offering bid guidance based on an advertiser’s goals.
It’s also about fast activation. And this is much more than setting up a deal and pushing it to a DSP. It’s about informed decisions, so campaigns are routed across the optimal supply paths to reach the audience as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
And let’s not forget, campaigns are dynamic. Market conditions alter across the life of the campaign, as do audiences, supply quality and performance. In the same way, true curation must mirror this and recognise the changes. You must ensure you spend the budget against the audience that was actually requested while delivering the right outcomes.
Humans and machines
As environments shift, curation must use data feeds to inform and reevaluate audience parameters, change the routing logic and adjust campaign settings and audiences. Because how a campaign starts can differ greatly from how it looks when it finishes. To perform at its maximum requires continuous structural changes. And it’s here where intelligent automation plays a vital role in reducing the operational burden of constant optimisation by processing all the available data signals. It’s something that wouldn’t be possible for humans to do on their own. But humans remain integral to curation success, because it’s their experience and expertise in interpreting the signals that decides the appropriate action to take. Their understanding of the nuances of audiences, context and culture feeds into how best to refine a campaign to maximise its performance. And this is something that automation cannot compensate for.
Introducing individual tools has been the industry’s response to tackle programmatic’s challenges and opportunities as they arise, which has fuelled complexity. And when planning, execution and decision-making all rely on disparate, disconnected technologies, we get inefficient and ineffective operations that become a liability. Users have been overwhelmed by the technologies they are forced to work with, and it’s why the market – and competitive advantage - is shifting from individual tools to systems that connect them. Tools may have fixed issues, but systems are all about outcomes. It’s why true curation can only be delivered through a unified system and comprehensive strategy that brings together all the key components. If you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on its real value.
