The Targeting Power Shift
The rise of curation in AdTech
For years, demand-side platforms (DSPs) were the go-to place for setting up targeting in programmatic advertising. Back in the late 2010s, if you worked in AdTech, you’d probably be quite safe to assume that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. Media buyers relied on DSPs to manage close to every aspect of targeting—be it behavioral, contextual, or demographic—because that’s just how things worked. The idea of shifting targeting responsibilities elsewhere seemed unrealistic and… pointless. Yet, here we are, watching the industry evolve in ways few expected.
This is where curation enters—a model that allows supply-side platforms (SSPs) to play a more active role in targeting by allowing external vendors, called curators, to create a bundle of inventory and data into pre-packaged deals. This shift has sparked debates in the industry: Why are SSPs now allowing their partners to handle targeting, and what does it mean for all other market participants?
The Old World: Targeting as a DSP-exclusive function
A few years ago, DSPs acted as a main hub of audience targeting. Advertisers relied on them to configure all their targeting settings, while data providers had to navigate individual integrations with each DSP to make their data visible on the market. This system worked, but it wasn’t without its hurdles—it was a structured, DSP-led world where efficiency sometimes took a back seat to gatekeeping. What do we mean by that? The downsides of this approach were not visible to the naked eye of a regular media buyer. Over time, some challenges started to become more than irritating:
Integration costs: Each DSP had to manually integrate every new data provider and maintain a dedicated marketplace, making it resource-intensive, especially regarding data storage costs.
Cookie matching limitations: Since DSPs maintained their own cookie pools, every data provider had to sync separately with each DSP, leading to inefficiencies and privacy-related risks.
Revenue uncertainty: DSPs were reluctant to onboard too many data providers without guaranteed revenue. Why put hours' worth of effort into an integration pipe on top of maintaining yet another cookie mapping table without proven demand?
This created a fragmented ecosystem where data providers had to lobby DSPs to be onboarded, leading to slow activation cycles and relationship-building barriers.
The Shift: How curation enables targeting at the SSP level
The rise of curation changed this model by allowing curators to apply targeting logic at the supply-side level. Instead of integrating with DSPs one by one, data providers or publishers could integrate with a handful of SSPs, which would then apply their data across a broad range of DSPs. This is done through curated deals, where curators create pre-packaged inventory and data combinations and assign a Deal ID, allowing buyers to target specific segments without needing to integrate with each DSP individually. From a data provider’s perspective, it also meant that you could reach more clients who were bonded with a DSP that they were locked out of integrating with.
Why this shift happened:
Operational efficiency: A data provider can integrate with just a few SSPs and get broad DSP coverage.
Faster activation: No need for DSP-side development. You can run a one-to-many integration instead of a one-to-one.
Bypassing DSP politics: Data providers don’t have to compete for limited integration slots on DSPs. You might comment that with this amount of hype, SSPs will run into the same problem. Our guess based on experience is that SSPs quickly learned how to offload the majority of the work on the integration to the Curator, which as a result, allowed them to be less selective about how many vendors they work with.
The Conflict: SSPs vs. DSPs on targeting control
One argument against such a method of targeting is that budget spenders prefer to have the capability to manage the targeting settings themselves in a singular user interface and prefer not to rely on tinkered settings hidden inside a black box that they can’t open. The rise of curated deals hasn't fundamentally changed this expectation.
The case with curation is that you don’t need to give up any control that you had before. Let’s go over an example where, in the past, advertisers might have selected a third-party data segment within a DSP. Now, you can compare that to choosing a curated deal through an SSP, which offers similar transparency and control. Marketers are not relinquishing control just because they are using a different integration path—whether they target a data segment or a curated deal, the ability to manage and trust their targeting settings remains intact. They still need to have some level of trust towards the data provider. This can always be built based on testing the performance, quality, and scale of the data you are buying.
On top of that, some argue that curation offers a new level of precision—data providers can now pre-filter impressions tailored to a specific use case before they ever reach the DSP. With real-time curation integrations sprouting on the market, data providers can step up their game even further. This means advertisers are working with more refined targeting from the start. Advertisers can still layer their own targeting on top of curated deals, provided they communicate their needs with the curator. Striking the right balance between curation and DSP-level targeting is essential to ensure enough bid requests flow through to meet campaign spending goals.
Conclusion: What’s next? The future of targeting in AdTech
If DSPs are frustrated with SSPs taking over aspects of data-driven targeting, the solution is simple: make it easier for data providers to integrate—not in terms of technical complexity, but by fostering relationships, reducing bureaucratic hurdles, and being open to partnerships beyond just revenue-driven decisions.
There are still some challenges that DSPs could address that may be difficult for individual SSPs to solve. We mentioned that one data provider can integrate with just a few SSPs to reach multiple DSPs, but that reach is ultimately limited to the bid requests coming from those specific SSPs. At first glance, this seems obvious, but DSPs have the advantage of seeing traffic from multiple SSPs, some of which may offer unique opportunities. Curators who rely solely on public inventory from a single SSP risk missing out on those segmentation possibilities.
This highlights the key takeaway: those willing to do the work will reap the rewards. If DSPs don’t want SSPs to encroach on their territory, they should take the initiative and make integration more seamless. Otherwise, they shouldn't complain if someone else steps in to do it better.
The industry will continue to evolve, but the battle for control over targeting won’t go away. DSPs need to decide whether they want to remain in control or allow SSPs to fill the gap. One thing is clear: curation has fundamentally changed the landscape of programmatic targeting, and it’s here to stay.
