Why Everyone Is Talking About Curation

Aaron Grote VP, Digital Products

If you like conspiracies, the recent (and seemingly out-of-nowhere) explosion of articles, takes, counter-takes, and memes about curation in CTV advertising would have had you running for your bulletin board and string. If you’re a programmatic advertising super-geek, it was like someone finally made a Real Housewives series just for you. If you’re a normal advertising professional, you were probably wondering what the heck people were yelling about. 

So after being asked a bunch of times, “What the heck is everyone yelling about?” we thought we’d write it out so we could just tap the sign. 

Quickly though, what do people mean when they talk about curation in CTV advertising? They mean a middle ground between single-publisher direct buys and what seems like a default in programmatic buying to buy pretty much anything anyone’s slapping a “CTV” label on. 

Like, if you want a good afternoon of browsing quality art you have a few options. Option 1, go to the super fancy gallery for the famous artist and all you get to look at their stuff, at their crazy prices. Option 2, drive to the railroad yard and look at graffiti on boxcars. Or, Option 3,  go to a museum and look at a collection of quality art from a variety of reputable artists carefully curated by an expert in the space. 

Of course, Option 3 is the right choice for almost everybody. So why is this such a big deal? 

Because, way too often, it’s hard for an advertiser – or even their agency! – to know for sure which option is being applied to their CTV buys. Which is wild to think about. 

So, what do we think here at Stirista? 

First, we think curation is really important. In programmatic CTV a common phrase for the boxcar graffiti option is “run of network”, which is kind of a misappropriated term from linear TV. We think that’s bad and don’t do it. Instead, we source customized feeds of CTV impression opportunities aligned to our standards and requirements. We do that for all of the most common intents CTV buyers have, and we do it for custom niche needs specific advertisers have. Then we do it all over again with multiple suppliers so we have redundancy and competition. And we put these together into what we call Supply Packages so our CTV buyers can achieve highly complex, highly curated supply intents with a single click. 

Basically, you can walk into the museum, decide what you’re looking for that day, then simply walk into that wing and you get a bunch of great art that’s exactly what you’re looking for. So that’s the first part. 

The second part is maybe even more important though, and it’s about transparency. This whole curation dialogue wouldn’t have been the explosion of feelings and takes and borderline-accusations if the industry was more transparent. If it was easy for everybody to know what Option their campaign was using, there would be less boxcar graffiti shenanigans, and fewer people having social media proxy wars over a silly concept with an obvious right answer for most CTV buyers. 

Which is why, at Stirista, transparency and control are core principles. Maximum control, made easy through Supply Packages. Maximum transparency and granularity in our reporting. And in the end, maximally empowered advertisers.