Category: In the News

Curation’s biggest problem might be its name.

Everyone has a different version of it. Ask an ad tech vendor, and curation is about packaging high-quality inventory for better performance. Ask a data broker, and it’s a vehicle for layering on proprietary audiences. Ask a publisher, and it is a rare chance to reassert some control in an ecosystem that’s spent the last decade pulling power away from them. The only thing everyone can agree on? It’s a growth area.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Money is moving behind it. Deals are getting done. The term “curation” now appears in pitch decks, product updates and M&A strategy. It’s become a default explanation for what comes next in programmatic.

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Despite there being a sea of more than 250 retail media networks, the reality is that it works out to be Amazon, Walmart and everybody else. Everybody else — in other words, the smaller players like Best Buy Ads and DoorDash — has spent Q1 of this year working to step out of Amazon and Walmart’s shadows and take in more ad spend.

While media buyers and retail media agency executives say there’s a chance for these smaller competitors to achieve their goal and actually take in more ad spend, it’s unclear if their efforts, which include third-party partnerships and new ad offerings, will be enough to eat into the market share of the RMN titans.

“If these small networks can play their data cards right, they can set themselves apart from Walmart and Amazon,” Cindy Meltzer, vp of research and analytics at ad agency Dagger, said in an email to Digiday. “Sometimes niche is more profitable than scale.”

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