Curated Marketplaces: What Buyers and Sellers of Digital Advertising Need to Know

While the marketplace model is not a new concept for digital advertising, the industry has matured in recent years to simplify the complex digital media landscape. Direct relationships between buyers and sellers are being re-established and big steps are being taken to improve the supply chain. Marketers, who now have a better understanding of the supply chain, are looking to regain control not only over their ad spend, but also over the performance of their campaigns. With the pending elimination of third-party cookies, these goals take on even greater importance. At the same time, as header bidding continues to proliferate, publishers want to ensure that their key media buyers are still able to effectively reach and leverage their inventory. In response, the 'classic' programmatic marketplace has evolved into a curated one, the "Curated Marketplace."

The advantages of a curated marketplace

A curated marketplace sits between the sell-side (SSP) and the buy-side (DSP) and gives the 'curator' the ability to bundle inventory as well as build their own programmatic marketplace. For example, the curator can be an agency that determines what inventory it will make available to the buy-side through the curated marketplace. This provides more control, transparency and direct access to inventory, while eliminating unnecessary intermediaries in the value chain.

Publishers can easily and accurately provide high-quality inventory through curated marketplaces, while helping to promote greater transparency across media, technology, and costs. In addition, publishers who own user data have the option to generate greater reach through their own marketplaces. Curating data, in combination with inventory, optimizes the efficiency of targeting.

Curated marketplaces also offer various advantages for pure data providers. As a rule, they have to rely on various integrations to provide their data. However, via the curated marketplace, they can market their data across the board and only need a single integration to do so. Regardless of which technology the buying or selling side uses.

On the buyer side, this development helps to aggregate inventory with buyers' needs in mind, and it makes inventory easily available. At the same time, it increases the reach of first-party data to create a scaled marketplace for buyers, which also enables them to buy programmatic inventory themselves instead of having it done by third parties.

The most significant benefit to using a curated marketplace is the overarching control and overall increase in efficiency. Users benefit from improved business performance with higher media quality and transparency, as well as the ability to curate the best quality inventory at the best price. Curated marketplaces allow them to create customized as well as tailored solutions.

This will enable agencies and holding companies to easily collaborate with technology companies and search for the best advertising opportunities on the supply side.

In the future, programmatic marketplaces will focus more on optimizing the buyer's journey to the offer. Digital marketing will continue to be ROI-driven, which is why the focus in the future will be on redesigning the current value chain. The goal is to combine technologies into a new, more efficient, transparent and simpler programmatic model. Curated marketplaces are making a significant contribution to the evolution of the programmatic ecosystem, yet conversations between the various parties will continue to be important. This is the only way to work on the optimal partnership and create a curated marketplace that is more effective for all parties.