Is AdTech Prepared for the Curation Era, or Are We Still Catching Up?
If you’re an AdTech professional and you still don’t know what curation is, don’t worry, you’re not alone. The term has become one of AdTech's hottest buzzwords, yet it can still feel vague. To kick this off, let’s start simple and quote the official IAB Tech Lab definition: Curation is the selection and organization of inventory using technology and data, to create effective packages for advertisers through prepackaged or real-time operations. Still sounds fuzzy? Imagine this: you want to know if a movie is good, so you send your friend to watch it first. They come back, tell you what it was like, and then you decide if you want to go yourself or maybe bring a date. Similarly, in AdTech, a curator checks the inventory by verifying whether it’s brand safe, meets your targeting criteria, organizes it, and then gives advertisers a clearer package to decide on. That’s curation, explained simply, now let’s explore why it matters today.
Curation is gaining traction because it reflects a broader industry shift, as described in our article The Targeting Power Shift. With the trend of looking for privacy-preserving technologies in AdTech, advertisers are searching for alternatives that combine reach with trust. Curation started as a simple way for data providers to package audience segments, but it has grown into something more powerful — the ability to merge those segments with carefully chosen inventory. This pairing gives buyers not just another targeting feature, but a smarter, more performance-driven way to access OpenWeb.
While this is a breakthrough trend, many features and functionalities in the market still require catching up to make curation even better. In this article, we’ll point to a few of those examples and explain why, despite the gaps, curation is still worth looking into, especially for less tech-savvy professionals who care more about the outcomes of their campaigns rather than the inner workings of AdTech.
The first challenge for curators is that, despite already reducing the number of integrations compared to the DSP-led world we described in The Targeting Power Shift, they still need to work across multiple SSPs. This often results in a curated offering being replicated across several Deal IDs. These are not exact duplicates, but variations tied to different SSPs. Each SSP can add unique value — access to its own exclusive inventory, different commercial agreements with publishers that affect which deal wins, or additional data passed along to DSPs that can influence bidding. From the buy side, this still creates more operational overhead, but our testing proves that the benefit is worth the hassle. Perhaps there is still some room for standardization to simplify the acceptance of "sibling" Deal IDs across multiple SSPs.
Another area where the industry could unlock even more value from curation is through Deal Marketplaces. While DSPs and SSPs have long offered data marketplaces where advertisers can browse and activate segments, whether ID-based or contextual, there is still no mainstream equivalent for curated deals. Today, buyers usually cannot simply log in and explore curated Deal IDs the way they once browsed data in the DMP era of audience targeting. Instead, they often need to approach curators one-by-one to request access. Historically, the ease of data access was what fueled the rapid growth of audience targeting, so it’s surprising that a true Deal Marketplace isn’t yet a standard feature across major DSPs. Especially since such Deals, bought off the shelf, could be activated immediately, while those created manually require some additional time for synchronization between the SSP and a DSP, which may delay the launch of your campaign.
Last but not least, cookie-based segment targeting has historically lacked transparency. Buyers would often only receive an audience segment, with little to no information about what data or inventory it contained (besides the short description deducted from the segment name). This black-box approach made it difficult to evaluate the value of a targeting set or troubleshoot when expectations weren’t met. Curation, on the other hand, can allow for categorization in real-time, just when the bid request is being generated, ensuring that the data used in the Deal is still recent. To further improve this transparency, IAB Tech Lab is actively working on improving standards, and the Deal API is one of the most promising examples, even if it is still very much a work in progress. The initiative is designed to solve this transparency gap by allowing potential buyers to peek inside the deal, surfacing key details such as who curated it, what inventory it includes, whether additional data is applied, and even how fees are structured. This shift represents a major step forward for the industry, bringing much-needed clarity and accountability to curated deals. If this brief introduction to Deal API has you interested, make sure to sign up to IAB's Curation Working Group to find out more!
Despite these hurdles, curation already represents a step up from traditional ID-based audience targeting. It gives advertisers more transparency, fresher data, and smarter ways to combine segments with inventory. The ecosystem may not be fully polished yet, but every step forward brings new value. For early adopters, the rewards go beyond immediate uplifts — they also include helping to shape how this new model of targeting continues to evolve. What’s more, early adopters can position themselves ahead of competitors by gaining hands-on experience with workflows and standards that are very likely to become mainstream.
