The idea of programmatic curation is not new. But as the digital advertising industry flexes and twists to meet the needs of changing consumers, privacy regulations and emerging channels, it is seeing momentum build globally as well as in Australia.
The basic premise of programmatic curation is simple, if multifaceted. It offers buyers strategic control over the properties where their ads appear, as well as control over the data used to inform ad buying decisions through the creation of their own marketplaces. This leads to operational efficiencies and improved reporting. For sellers and data owners, it provides an opportunity to protect against potential negative impacts from changes to cookies or other identifiers. It also helps combat fragmentation and gives data owners the chance to build new revenue streams.
However, there are misconceptions around curations on both sides of the ledger, according to Microsoft Advertising’s commercial director for Media and AdTech Solutions in ANZ, Mark Serhan and Microsoft Advertising’s Head of Monetize partnerships JAPAC Tom Dover. Microsoft Advertising’s own Curate product, while again not new, addresses many of the problems that buyers and sellers face in the modern digital ecosystem.
A Smarter Way to Curate
“We were one of, if not the first, technology platforms to offer a curation product. It was born out of a need to create clearinghouse efficiencies for data providers to monetise their assets in a better way, as well as for large agency holding groups to track the effectiveness of their spend. We built this tech five years ago, now it’s become a bit of a buzzword because the market has become flooded with curation products,” said Dover.
Microsoft Curate was built with control and transparency in mind. With a full reporting suite and log level data available, buyers enjoy a transparent solution to efficiently shape spend according to their goals. At the same time, we recognised that publishers wanted to remain in control of their inventory. Microsoft Curate therefore respects the same controls such as floor price, ad quality (to name a couple of many) that publishers set in Monetize SSP. Curate passes through reporting parameters to Monetize SSP that enable publishers to see the same data they do from non-curated demand, giving the same control over curated and non-curated demand sources.
Five years ago, the digital ad ecosystem looked very different. The EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA had been in place for less than a year. Google had not yet announced its intention to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, though it has now backflipped on that decision. Microsoft Advertising’s Curate product, then, has moved with the times and has been offering buyers and sellers genuine choice for a while.
“Supply is ubiquitous across platforms, and the market has created a plethora of solutions to help cordon off bits of the marketplace that could look appealing to buyers,” continued Dover, explaining one of the problems that marketers and agencies face when buying digital ad space nowadays.
Serhan added that Curate stands apart from rivals because it bases its recommendations on deeper, more business-critical data.
“We created a self-service platform that curators use themselves. Curate can help agencies control where their advertisers should be investing, whilst also helping investment teams monitor the annual deals that they have in place with publishers. Buyers can package multiple, negotiated deals into one curated deal ID, instead of 15 different deals across the multiple DSP seats that they use. It also allows them to better track their spend through consolidated reporting,” he said.
“It gives the tools back to the buyer, data provider or publisher to better package data and premium supply in a streamlined fashion that significantly reduces their operational lift”. We collaborate closely with publishers and agencies to ensure that they have full control over the end-to-end process.
This not only saves time but also can help agencies and marketers start generating revenue faster. Another timesaver, according to Serhan, is Curate’s Supply Shaping feature, which allows agencies to create spending allocation rules based on multiple dimensions
“Rather than traders needing to split out five different lines in the DSP and then manually allocate different percentages to each publisher, those rules can be created by investment teams at an overarching level, reducing pressure on traders,” he explained.
“Agencies are under a lot of resource pressure. From an operational overhead perspective, this really streamlines the buying process for them by reducing the number of deals they need to target, giving investment teams more control over spend and freeing up trading teams to better optimise their campaigns and ultimately drive better results for their clients.”
Tools for Unique Audience Planning and Activation
For Dover, much of Curate’s benefits for publishers and agencies come from its ability to work hand-in-glove with the rest of Microsoft Advertising’s platform ecosystem, and its innovative ways to create audiences.
“Curate is a multi-faceted tool. I increasingly describe it to publishers as a Swiss army knife. You can pick your destiny with the use case you have for it. One emerging use case, for example, is being able to give publishers a Curate seat to operate their audience extension business. Big publishers take direct bookings from buyers and say, ‘I have data that works within my own environment, outside of my network, and I want to use that data to get you better results, reach and ROI. I can put my data in my Curate seat and buy my inventory across my network, plus outside my own network,” he said.
“That’s a tried-and-trusted route, but the thing that makes it different with Microsoft Curate is that we have a selection of audience tools in the product. As soon as anyone puts an audience within Curate, it can be matched to our audience intelligence, which gives extended reach across cross-device environments of logged-in users that Microsoft knows.”
Curate also has a planning tool, giving agencies and marketers the ability to estimate reach across audiences, budgets and inventory with hashed email capabilities. Publisher sales team can also utilise planner to forecast the amount of reach and the right price for inventory and audience deals on and off their own network. This mitigates make goods for under delivery and allows publishers to create new revenue opportunities through efficiencies and new packages. Publishers and advertisers have even been using Real-Time Signals Service feeds to create contextual segments on the fly. Other curation products, on the other hand, tend to focus on grouping inventory with the same 3rd party data sources available across the marketplace, without planning or unique data and audience enrichment, according to Dover.
Curation With Scale
At the most basic level, programmatic advertising’s principal advantage over other methods of trading media is its scale. Advertisers, large and small, get access to inventory that would otherwise be unavailable. Reducing that scale, a common concern of programmatic curation, may seem counterintuitive. But the world of media is changing and becoming more fragmented, and identity solutions are changing.
The new wave of audience identifiers–Unified ID 2.0 and RampID, to name a couple–are designed to work across multiple media types. Microsoft Curate uses all these forms of ID in its offering.
“A curator can overlay these segments and identifiers cleanly. They can even go a step further and activate hashed email addresses within that environment,” said Serhan.
“But the real benefit of Curate is to be able to see the reach of those identifiers overlaid on supply before they go live. Typically, the biggest issue in programmatic is that your DSP and SSP are operating in siloes. For instance, a trader might be trying to buy segments across inventory that doesn’t support cookies, creating a back-and-forth and lots of troubleshooting. Curate can tell you upfront if you’re not going to get any reach because you’re trying to target cookie-based segments across device ID-based supply like CTV.”
Programmatic advertising transacts in milliseconds. But the near-instantaneous purchase-to-place supply chain requires significant work for media agencies beforehand. As media agencies shrink in headcount, either because of consolidation, reduction in client activities or any other reasons, agency staff are faced with an ever-expanding roster of tools, platforms and interfaces that they must use to get their clients into media. Is Microsoft Curate, for all its virtues, just another thing to log in to?
Microsoft has been working with Telfast and its agency, Hearts & Science, with Curate and its API tools. As a result of its work, creating automatic triggers and algorithms based on live pollen count data, Telfast streamlined campaign management, reducing object complexity from 250-line items to just 14. It also minimised reliance on third-party cookies by updating data twice an hour and targeting audiences by postcode. This reduced media waste and served more impactful creatives.
“It created significant operational efficiencies,” said Serhan.
“The world’s largest brands want to own more of their technology,” added Dover, “you could be the agency that has a really innovative product and idea, like the Telfast campaign, but you could be restricted by the fact you’re directed to use a specific DSP. Curate allows you to standardise and do all of the decision-making a layer above, only presenting a deal to whichever DSP your client wants. You get a consistent product which adds your special sauce, talent and ideas. You aren’t limited by technology.”
“We’ve built the product over the years to give publishers control over advertiser demand. We’ve also built transparent, clean reporting to show exactly where the dollars are coming from, the clearing rates, floor prices and the deals. They can then connect to intelligent buyers, like Hearts & Science in the Telfast example, to agree to that particular use case and benefit from the additional spend.
Levelling the Playing Field
The other common complaint with curation is nearly the inverse of a reduction in audience size. By further honing the audiences and types of inventory you want, smaller publishers may be unable to compete. But it doesn’t have to be the case.
“There’s another use case for curation at a platform level, which highlights smaller publishers and puts them in the shop window. Microsoft Advertising has a catalogue of deals that we put in our own curation seat. We ask publishers if they would like to be in the shop window and we push these deals into buyers’ DSP of choice. In fact, they’re in 17 different DSPs at the moment,” he said. Microsoft Advertising has a specific packaging team that buyers can work with to create off the shelf and custom deals in this way.
“Increasingly, we’re creating inventory highlights around tentpole events such as live sport that give smaller publishers a chance to shine. We all know that audience behaviour goes all over the internet, and the value is found in those corners of the internet when someone is about to make a purchase.”
Serhan added that for large, multinational advertisers, Curate gives them a shorthand for finding influential publishers in countries they may be less familiar with or active in.
“We could package up sports. So when the Olympics come around, publishers covering that content can tap into demand from global advertisers really easily, and they haven’t had to do any of the legwork. It’s a new source of demand for them,” he said.
The benefits of curated programmatic are manifold, and Microsoft’s Curate, as one of the longest serving, is ideally placed to help you make more from programmatic, whichever side of the ledger you’re on.
Discover how Microsoft Curate can help you maximise your programmatic.
