Rules to curate by: the future is smart

While audience curation services initially emerged as a response to the once-imminent cookie deprecation, they now play a central role in digital media strategies the world over.

And there is sharp growth on the horizon – especially when it comes to smart, or AI-driven, curation. Recent research suggests that 87% of European marketers experienced enhanced ROI through AI implementation of curation and 80% reporting a reduction in advertising waste. What’s more, 90% of agency and brand marketers channel at least some of their ad spend through curation, with nearly a third of them (29%) funnelling at least 40% of spend through such platforms.

Curation has proven its worth across both PMPs and the open exchange, and with the emergence of smart curation, we are now seeing the most significant stage in its evolution. This AI-driven technology facilitates more efficient bidding on quality media inventory, with vastly improved user matching for greater relevance, scale and performance.

Also Read: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Here are the principles we recommend you follow to maximise the potential of smart curation.

The 10 rules for smart curation

1. Embrace a cookieless era: Regardless of Google’s recent announcement, the fact is, as we continue to move towards a more user-centric, privacy-compliant and interoperable ecosystem, enriched by addressable and contextual signals, we are inevitably moving beyond a reliance on cookies. Now is the time to adapt to new standards and focus on better targeting without cookies.
2. Eradicate ad waste: With the programmatic advertising ecosystem generating significant amounts of wastage, alongside a greater focus on responsible practices in advertising, smart curation supports industry efforts to cut waste and emissions. What’s more, with the unveiling of industry body sustainability frameworks, the environmental efficiencies associated with AI-driven advertising technology will become increasingly quantifiable.

3. Increase efficiency: The refinement of data involved in the smart curation process fundamentally saves time and reduces costs. By enabling better matches on the supply side, and higher quality impressions on the buy side, AI can be used to streamline the entire programmatic supply chain.

4. Always be transparent: Curation driven by AI champions trustworthy campaigns that follow a clear, simplified path to execution, as well as resonating with audiences and delivering a far superior user experience. It does this while maintaining an all-important level of transparency in the media planning and buying stages and reducing intermediaries.

5. Opt for premium data: By applying top-tier data and insights within deal creation on the supply side, smart curation drives far higher user match rates and thereby more meaningful engagement with content from the outset.

6. Unleash the potential of the open web: AI provides the means to safely access the full potential of the open web by finding overlooked but high-quality audiences, while avoiding low-quality impressions wherever these appear.
7. Be prepared with predictive planning: Over two-fifths (43%) of European brands and agencies noted that leveraging predictive audience data for campaign planning was their top priority for curated media. Smart curation leans on fully-compliant first-party data to deliver addressability for predictive audiences in general and specifically for consumer characteristics and behaviours.

8. Get granular with semantic data: Smart curation technology offers the ability to go beyond standard contextual advertising focused on site classification and keywords, analysing instead the meaning of open web content and its inter-relationship across web pages. This type of advanced contextual advertising offers greater reach, faster ad delivery, guaranteed relevance, and up to five times higher CTRs vs the rest of the open auction.
9. Make decisions in real time: The immediate, dynamic measurement and optimisation provided by Smart curation empowers marketers to make important decisions in the moment to drive continually high campaign performance.
10. Collaborate: A key rule of AI-enhanced curation is that collaboration is always better than isolation. Smart curation enables all parties in the programmatic ecosystem to reach targeted audiences at greater scale within premium environments, tailored to individual preferences.

The future of digital advertising – across both private and open auctions – lies in the strategic and collaborative implementation of smart curation, which leverages AI to enhance efficiency, transparency, and audience engagement, and ultimately, deliver ads in the environment in which they are most likely to convert.

By following these ten principles, marketers can optimise their spend, reduce waste, and propel campaign performance in an increasingly privacy-focused landscape.