Why Does Adtech Keep Rebranding The Same Thing?

Traffic curation has become a recurring term in programmatic advertising. However, its meaning is often unclear. Imagine a cafeteria with a hundred different potato dishes. Each plate has a different name, but it’s still potatoes underneath. That’s how it feels with OpenRTB, dozens of names, acronyms and ‘flavours,’ yet it’s still the same base protocol everyone’s been serving for years.

The industry is obsessed with rebranding existing mechanics rather than fixing fundamental inefficiencies. This cycle often creates misalignment and mistrust, but is it the same with traffic curation?

 

The Market Imbalance: Why Adtech Is Shifting

 

Several structural imbalances in the programmatic ecosystem contribute to the shift:

• There are more advertisers than publishers, creating demand-side pressure
• Intermediary platforms often retain more revenue than the publishers themselves
• Existing publishers face low monetisation efficiency, while the market requires more high-quality inventory

Addressing these issues requires models that help publishers increase profits while delivering more high-quality advertising inventory and maintaining growing campaign performance.

 

Curated Deals: A Win-Win Market Response

 

The market responded with a growing share of curated deals due to the publishers’ long-awaited needs. It’s still the same OpenRTB but with a new sauce that inventory owners prefer.

The tricky part? The IAB Curation Working Group hasn’t yet formally defined curated deals. The TeqBlaze team participates in the discussions and currently, the only precise measure for curated deals that everyone agrees on is the measurable improvements in campaign performance for advertisers and higher profits for publishers.

How Curated Deals Actually Work

 

Let’s discuss a ready-made mechanic called Curated Deals by TeqBlaze. While the definition of traffic curation isn’t agreed upon universally, these deals have already been tested and proven to improve trading results.

• Inventory types: Curated deals apply to all types of advertising inventory; Web (Desktop and Mobile Web), In-App, Connected TV (CTV), Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) and Audio (Digital Streaming, Podcasts) and are equally effective for regular and premium placements
• Direct trading: Publishers and advertisers participate in curated deals directly through their dedicated ad platforms, SSP and DSP which guarantees that the supply path is optimised and there aren’t intermediaries with unnecessary markups on impressions
• Pricing models: The price in curated deals is based on CPM or fixed at an agreed-upon level. In both cases, the deal implies higher profits for publishers and increased ad campaign performance for advertisers
• Quality assurance: The supply side integrates additional traffic scanners to strengthen brand protection and maintain high-quality traffic
• Estimated efficiency: Due to the limited number of hand-picked bidders, sellers can predict the performance of curated deals based on historical trading data and provide buyers with these assessments. This approach is more sophisticated than PMP, as buyers are pre-selected based on value-added inventory
• Targeting: Most importantly, inventory targeting comes from a comprehensive approach that utilises audience and contextual data along with other advanced technologies, such as ID-matching. Cookies are not necessary here, but they might still be used to enhance targeting

The last point is worthy of a closer look, as it is the fundamental reason curated deals are gaining popularity in the industry, they bring the supply side to the forefront and allow publishers to make more profits.

 

Why Curated Deals Work For Both Sides

 

Advertisers select inventory from broad supply pools in open market trading, often requiring third-party tools to assess quality and relevance. In curated deals, the inventory is pre-selected and enriched with relevant data, reducing guesswork and enabling more efficient targeting.

Here is a detailed comparison with examples:

1. Open market: A buyer comes to a store’s shelves, chooses a product, and pays a third-party consultant to tell him whether this product suits his needs. That’s how programmatic usually works today and continues in many cases across the industry.
2. Curated deal: A buyer comes to the shelves in a store but only has access to shelves and specific products that are already suitable for them, each with a comprehensive set of data attached. There is no need for third-party consultants because the seller has already taken care of the information content.

While curated inventory is priced higher, it aligns better with buyer objectives and campaign performance. That’s the whole idea: the price corresponds to the quality.

 

The Risks Of Curation And How To Avoid Them

 

The most considerable risk is that curated deals become another buzzword for old tricks. Some players repackage low-quality inventory, enrich it with fragmented signals, and charge more. That’s not innovation, that’s inflation.

Also, the pitfall of curation is that publishers will again receive low profits, with the supply platform taking all the gains. This is a bad scenario. This only happens when there’s no trust or collaboration. The only way to avoid it is to build a trusting relationship between the publisher and the supply-side platform. It is also the only way to curate traffic effectively.

1. Publishers provide first-party data, primarily contextual data about their resources, to the SSP.
2. The SSP turns to third-party data providers to enrich the obtained inventory further with signals, including the audience of the resources where the ads will be displayed.
3. Then, the SSP utilises intelligent filtering to provide the most relevant inventory enriched with signals to the most appropriate buyers that prioritise performance and brand safety.

If everything is handled well, publishers will cooperate more closely with their monetisation partners, motivated by higher profits. Monetisation platforms will be able to earn more from fees when paying third-party data providers and from selling more performable inventory. Finally, the buyers receive a performance boost.

 

The Future Of Curation: Innovation Or Illusion?

 

Curated deals represent a step toward a more efficient and transparent programmatic ecosystem. However, in the AdTech landscape, someone will always want to ride two horses at once, seeking short-term profits while undermining long-term industry growth.

While formal definitions are still being developed, platforms can implement curated deal strategies today using available data and tools.

Unlike PMPs, which typically offer premium inventory in private auction environments, curated deals are defined by their value-added approach: combining supply-path optimisation, contextual and audience data enrichment, and direct sell-side involvement.

Done right, they’re not just exclusivity rebranded, they’re a more innovative, data-driven way to trade. But without transparency and quality controls, they risk becoming just another fancy label on the same old problems.

AdTech enthusiasts constantly look for ways to develop, while dishonest players feed off their progress. As much as the industry loves rebrands, a new trading approach is always based on a desire to satisfy specific needs. Traffic curation makes sense only when enhancing campaign performance and growing publishers’ profits simultaneously. Tech details don’t matter; the results will prove their value better than words.

For those seeking to operationalize curation within their platforms, TeqBlaze provides guidance and technology solutions tailored to this evolving strategy.