SSP Curation: Everyone’s Doing It, But Why?

Leverage SSP-Based Audience Targeting and Curation For More Scale and Efficiency

These days, you can’t go to a conference without curation being a panel topic. When asked why it’s a good strategy, we often hear answers such as “SSPs sit closer to supply and are better positioned for decisioning,” “curation mitigates risk,” and “it allows SSPs to add value to the supply path.” But that’s usually where it ends.

We never hear specifics nor learn exactly what curation – or any type of targeting via an SSP – does to make programmatic work better. Unpacking the technical reasons why SSP curation and audience targeting in particular are necessary reveals the key benefits for each participant in the ecosystem’s supply path.

Why Activate Data With An SSP?

Reduced Data Loss From Cookie-Syncing

Every time third-party cookies sync across the supply path, marketers lose data. A recent Ad Exchanger report shows the typical match rate loss between ad tech platforms ranges from 40 – 70%, costing platforms, marketers, and publishers millions in lost revenue. Targeting audiences with the SSP means one less data hop and one less opportunity to lose scale from inefficient cookie syncing and matching.

Turnkey 3P Data Cookieless Targeting

Audience segments in Equativ Buyer Connect can contain an alternative ID, automatically boosting scale in cookieless browsers while solving match rate data loss in Chrome. By including third-party data as part of curation, you can easily message previously unreachable audiences with just a click of a button. With 35 – 50% of consumers using cookieless browsers, depending on the region, it’s essential to use this strategy today.

No Data Leakage

SSPs have strong, direct relationships with publishers and can enforce stricter privacy controls to ensure data is being used responsibly and securely. At Equativ, we don’t share the full audience segment data with DSPs or other parties. This protects CDP data, improves consumer privacy, and helps publishers control their data assets.

Easier Brand 1P Data Workflow

Brands that onboard their customer database data to an SSP can target their audiences via a single Deal ID with any DSP for an easier workflow than pushing first-party data to multiple DSPs.

Curation Ensures DSPs Evaluate Relevant Bid Requests

Audience targeting with an SSP makes curation even more powerful. To understand how let’s take a closer look at why curating supply helps marketers reach customers more effectively.

Changing media consumption habits – such as increased e-commerce adoption, smartphone use, and advanced TV viewing – have created more high-value inventory. This results in more publishers needing to ensure buyers can see their inventory while DSPs need a cost-efficient way to see all the relevant bids across a massive and expanding supply pool.

This is the fundamental challenge in programmatic today: matching the most relevant supply to the most relevant demand so that buyers and sellers alike achieve the best possible transactions.

Publishers Seek To Maximize Selling Opportunities

To reach the largest possible pool of buyers, publishers both partner directly with a select number of SSPs and also authorize other businesses to resell their inventory. While this approach can boost auction competitiveness and increase access to DSPs, the downside is it can also create redundant supply paths and duplicative bidding opportunities.

Publishers are now competing to create more auctions and be more available to DSPs. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean DSPs see more bids, nor that the end buyer has a chance to bid on the inventory they want to target.

DSPs Seek Relevant and Efficient Buying

With this massive increase in supply quality and increased bid congestion, DSPs face the technical challenge of evaluating billions of requests and doing so cost-efficiently. Looking at every bid opportunity in the ecosystem simply isn’t feasible.

The blunt solution is to filter the number of impressions coming in and cap the bid requests sent by supply partners. While this mitigates costs and favors sustainability, the result is that the DSPs can miss the chance to evaluate the bids relevant to the marketers using their platform.

Fortunately, we have better alternatives. Curation via an SSP is a laser-focused approach that helps ensure DSPs evaluate relevant bids while limiting costs and the environmental impact of processing so much data.

Curation: A Quantum Leap In Supply Path Efficiency

With curation, the SSP pre-qualifies inventory and only sends bid requests that the DSP and the marketers using it want to buy. Audience and contextual data, bid stream and performance signals, and inventory types are targeted via a curation platform and packaged under a single Deal ID. Essentially, the targeting and inventory in the Deal ID are determined ahead of time by the buyer.

The SSP only sends a bid request to the DSP when all criteria in the Deal ID are met. This reduces the number of bid requests the DSP has to process, decreasing computational overhead, and mitigating the chance that a request is pre-filtered before a DSP evaluates it. No more missed bid opportunities is a business win for everyone. Curation reduces DSP costs, improves carbon efficiency, gives publishers more chances to get in front of buyers, and offers buyers more opportunities to bid on the most relevant inventory.

With Curation’s Precision, Everyone Wins

Every curation strategy must include audience targeting. Not only does it reduce data loss from multiple cookie syncs and allow cookieless targeting via Equativ alternative ID partners, but it also makes a curation strategy even more effective, facilitating reaching the right customer at scale.

Data activation via curation – and any type of targeting with an SSP – benefits all parties. Marketers can better reach their customers, publishers have more monetization opportunities, and DSPs can more efficiently reach the right audience and inventory.

Curation strengthens a DSP’s business and improves DSP economics by ensuring visibility on the bids most relevant to buyers while reducing infrastructure costs. It’s critical to view it not as something that competes with DSPs, but as a complement to them.

Curation also benefits the long tail of publishers, unlike what’s been increasingly suggested in the trades. To be clear, not all curation use cases include site lists focused on top publishers. It’s also about targeting signals and audiences. By ensuring DSPs can evaluate the most relevant signals and audiences, curation can help smaller publishers get in front of DSPs.

Ultimately, curation is a giant leap forward for programmatic ecosystem efficiency and a win-win-win for everyone across the supply path.

---