In a Fireside Chat at NDA’s recent Foresight event with Editor Justin Pearse, James Leaver, CEO, Multilocal, outlined the benefits of curation in programmatic advertising.
Are you a curator? Not in the museum/pictures sense, but in adtech. If you haven’t got the foggiest idea what that means, you wouldn’t be the first. “Not enough people in our industry know what it is,’ admits Multilocal CEO, James Leaver. Bear with us.
Happily, he goes on to explain. “Essentially, it’s bringing a lot of the buy-side features and functionalities over to the sell-side. It gives people working on the sell-side the ability to find, build and match audiences, making it more efficient for the buy-side.”
If you want an even shorter definition, curation gets rid of friction. “Curation gave us a platform to connect with hundreds of publishers,” Leaver continues. “Publishers have big buckets of inventory in different countries and programmatic enables them to monetise it, but not very effectively.”
This complex landscape is further complicated by the sheer volume of actors involved. Once you’ve planned your campaign, set up the deals with agencies, advertisers, data companies and so on, you have to set up deals with PMPs. “Anyone who’s worked with PMPs has probably got some form of PTSD,” Leaver states, “curation takes a lot of that hassle away.”
One of the issues with PMPs is that most people set it, and forget it. Without continuous optimisation, you don’t get the results. Curation means actively optimising all the time.
What does this mean in the real world? Curation delivers seamless results for both the buy and sell sides. “We’ve seen a 42% increase in CTR and a 38% boost in video completion rates, thanks to more precise audience targeting,” notes Leaver.
Curation isn’t about replacing the buy-side with the sell-side, but some still resist, creating roadblocks. “We need visibility into what’s happening on the DSP side. It’s surprising how many agencies still consider DSP reports privileged information and won’t share them,” he adds. “When they do, the results are significantly better.”
It comes down to the initial lack of awareness as to what curation means. “There’s a massive lack of education,” Leaver admits, revealing that the US is making much more progress – although most specifically in New York – as well as heading towards Asia and Singapore.
So, how to move curation forward if, indeed, it has so much potential for relieving some of the clutter that holds back the adtech industry? “It’s a massive opportunity for advertisers and they should be working with their agencies to get ahead of this because it’s a way of managing their supply – getting closer to the publishers, getting close to the data and really making sure they deliver results,” he insists.
NDA will be publishing a full report based on the content of Foresight later this week.
