The trending topic of deal curation has taken the ad industry by storm lately as media buyers seek to separate the open web’s wheat from the chaff.
But some publishers have griped about their lack of control over how ad tech vendors assemble these curated packages. Others complained that curation deals compete with their own direct sales efforts.
With these misgivings in mind, some enterprising pubs are banding together to curate inventory on their own terms – heeding longstanding calls for greater collective action from publishers. Even media rivals are combining forces to boost their value in the programmatic marketplace.
Atria is one such publisher collective. It launched in February as part of a partnership with the curation and data management platform Permutive. Atria features a mix of UK-based magazine and digital publishers that are generally direct competitors, including Hearst UK, Bauer Media, Immediate, Future, HELLO! and Time Out.
The group had been mulling a collective approach for years in response to growing monetization challenges, due to new standard practices such as social platforms restricting outbound links and AI-generated search summaries that dampen traffic, said James Walmsley, advertising director at Immediate.
