MadTech Sketch

The MadTech Sketch: Curation for the Ad Tech Nation

In this week's MadTech Sketch, Ciarán O'Kane takes a look at curation and the opportunities it offers in the current ad tech landscape.

Curation is not a new concept in ad tech. Ever since Dr Boris Mouzykantskii developed it for WPP some years ago, it has become a go-to for media execution.

It has grown to become the “lingua franca” of programmatic buying and selling - a means to scale specific data segments or ad tech features.  

Everyone from ad networks to publishers to agencies to brands are using curation to cover-off areas like ESG, sustainability and attention.

Curation knits many areas of programmatic buying together. This week’s MadTech sketch outlines what the modern curation workflow looks like, focusing on the key ingredients of your deal PMP.  

There are of course some downsides to PMP activation, specifically around selling and activation - both of which can restrict scale. And there will be issues around post-cookie/ID signals, as well as sustainability issues.  

Despite all of this, curation offers something unique: the framework to aggregate and scale a disparate ad tech ecosystem.

Curation for the ad tech nation, indeed.

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Ciaran O'Kane

Ciaran O’Kane is the Founder and Advisor to WireCorp, the publishing holding group focused on the digital advertising, retail technology and gaming sectors.  He has worked in digital advertising over the last twenty years as a developer, digital marketer, ad operations provider, media monetisation specialist and senior sales executive.  He continues to write editorial for ExchangeWire on advertising technology, marketing technology and programmatic  - and acts as an advisor to a number of leading digital media companies in Europe.

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