Curation

Curation is the packaging of inventory from one or more sellers, often combined with audience or contextual data, into a deal ID by a party that is neither the publisher nor the advertiser, so that buyers can purchase the package through their existing DSP and the curator is paid from the clearing price.

The curator may be an SSP, a data company, an agency or a retailer selling its audiences on third-party inventory. Technically, curation is a PMP deal created on an SSP with targeting applied on the sell side, which is why it is sometimes called sell-side decisioning. IAB Tech Lab's Deals API v1.0 (4 December 2025) is the first standard to name the roles explicitly, identifying "the seller, packager, and curator where applicable" for each deal, and Jounce Media's Chris Kane described a standard deal API as "one critical step toward more trusted sell-side decisioning" (IAB Tech Lab, 4 December 2025).

The economics are the contested part. A curated deal adds a fee between the advertiser and the publisher, and the data applied on the sell side is invisible to the buyer's DSP logs. Both AAMP and AdCP treat curation as a native workflow: AAMP wraps the Deals API as "Agentic Deals" (PPC Land, 1 March 2026), and AdCP's launch set named curation alongside media buy and audience activation (PPC Land, 16 October 2025). For a retail media network, curation is the fastest route to offsite revenue: the retailer's segment is applied to publisher inventory inside an SSP and sold as a deal ID.

Example: a grocer's "high-value pet owners" segment is matched to a publisher's inventory through a clean-room ID, packaged as deal GROC-PET-2026 on an SSP with a $9.00 floor, and sold to pet-food brands through any DSP; the grocer and the SSP split the margin above the publisher's price.

Related: deal ID, PMP, SPO, clean room.

Source: IAB Tech Lab, Deals API v1.0 (4 December 2025).

1. IAB Tech Lab, 4 December 2025
2. PPC Land, 1 March 2026
3. PPC Land, 16 October 2025