Why Index Exchange’s CEO thinks curation is programmatic’s biggest shake-up since header bidding — maybe even bigger

“Curation will be bigger than header bidding and as big as programmatic or RTB — that’s our bet,” Casale said at the Prebid Ascent event in London yesterday (March 4).

It’s a bold, if eyebrow-raising, claim, and to understand why, two things matter:

First, who’s making it. Casale runs an ad tech company in a commoditized part of the market, one that stands to gain if curation takes off.

Second, the impact of header bidding. It rewired programmatic advertising, replacing a waterfall system, where Google’s ad server had the final say on which ad would be served, with a unified auction that gave multiple ad exchanges a simultaneous shot at winning an ad impression. The result was a more level playing field, tougher competition for Google and a revenue boost for publishers.

But while header bidding reshaped auction dynamics, curation, at least in Casale’s view, is poised to upend something even bigger. It could rewrite how ad dollars flow, who captures the value and which players in the ecosystem lose their grip. That’s why he’s taking his time bringing Index Exchange’s own curation product, Index Marketplaces, to market.

Launched in beta last January, Index Marketplaces lets advertisers build curated deal packages through their preferred demand-side platform on Index Exchange’s platform. So far, 75 advertisers have launched their own marketplace, according to Casale.

“The open internet needs its version of [Google’s Performance Max], and I think what’s happening in curation is going to ignite that,” said Casale.

As Casale sees it, that opportunity lies in how curation shifts decision-making power in programmatic. Normally, control has sat on the buy-side, specifically the DSP ad tech that places bids. It’s the DSP that decides whether or not an impression is likely to drive an outcome or not, if it’s suitable for a marketer’s brand and even if that impression is right for a certain creative type. The sell-side doesn’t have much of a say in any of that — it doesn’t even necessarily know why it got that bid from the DSP.

“The sell-side, quite frankly, has been dumb for a decade because of this,” said Casale.

That’s exactly why execs like him are betting on curation. They see it as a way to reclaim control over how impressions are bought, shifting more of that decision-making to when an impression is put up for sale by a publisher rather than when it’s purchased by an advertiser.

In theory, that should be a win-win for both advertisers and publishers. The sell-side has access to far more bidding data than the buy-side, meaning it can surface more impressions to advertisers willing to buy them. DSPs, by contrast, only listen to a fraction of that data, limiting the number of opportunities to sell and buy.

“In some curation use cases we’re already finding scarcer audiences that were there the entire time but it was being throttled away and never getting to the DSP, which means more ad spend is now going to publishers,” said Casale.

Should this approach to programmatic advertising scale as aggressively as he hopes, it could start to reshape ad tech’s fee structure. For instance, Casale points out that activating on a DSP typically comes with a 10% cost. If Index Exchange moves that data to the sell-side at no activation cost, that’s 10% more ad spend going directly to publishers — or at least that’s the pitch.

“Marketers that have more ad dollars going to working media tend to have better win rates in the auction and if they’re finding scarcer audiences who are going to buy their products then they’re likely to sell more,” said Casale. “These are good things for the open internet at large.”

Whether curation can deliver that kind of shake-up anytime soon is another story.

“Curation as a concept is as significant as real-time bidding,” said Aly Nurmohamed, founder and CEO at ad tech startup Nodals AI. “Unlocking curation’s full potential will require innovation, but the concept itself propels us toward a future where programmatic buying is more strategic, dynamic and symbiotic between buyers and media owners.”

But for now, it remains a divisive topic in ad circles. Publishers aren’t sure if it’s a money maker for them or just for ad tech. Advertisers, meanwhile, are wary of the lack of transparency around what’s actually being curated.

None of this means curation should be written off entirely. Header bidding wasn’t met with unanimous support either. Publishers embraced it for its promise of higher revenues and a more competitive marketplace but plenty in ad tech, especially those invested in the waterfall model pushed back. Casale may be on to something. Some marketers seem to think so.

“We’ve been spending the better part of the last two years working closely with the buy-side because of the curation trend,” he continued at the event. “They’ve been calling us and coming to us because they’re excited at the innovative opportunity this represents.”