Curation

The New Hotness or the New Not-ness

Right now, the only thing you need to know about curation is there will be a lower funnel strategy and an upper funnel strategy. Publishers are in complete control of who enters the upper funnel by proxy of the ad server.

The scale and ease of the lower funnel compromises distribution of the upper funnel which is better quality, more targeted, more performant but also smaller and harder to execute. You may have heard me say before, you can’t have cheap, easy and sexy. Cheap and easy, isn’t sexy…unless publishers relinquish our value to the purveyors of scale.

Our emerging dilemma lies in controlling access to the upper funnel without bleeding our value to the lower funnel. We want to be able to sell our inventory, leverage our high value data and advocate for the value of our audiences. Publishers know how to offer the right placement to the right user at the right time. Can we compete with large scale, cheap, distribution channels that tell a similar story?

I believe we can but only if we uphold our value from the get go. We have a real opportunity to set a new stage, take control and drive more traditional value for our unique advertising offerings. It will require some tough and clear boundaries of what we want to offer the lower funnel. That decision will be different for every publisher. Collectively it will matter in the same way the growth of Open Market programmatic did.

All things new, shiny and promising in AdTech come with a lot of creative and attractive stories about the value proposition for publishers. The only ones with our best interests at heart is us.

As we broach a fresh BD cycle of promising solutions for publishers, we need to consider - is this a lower funnel strategy, does it compromise my upper funnel strategy? I believe those answers will guide us down a more empowering path for publishing. Heck, maybe we can have nice things!