Finding the Right Audience in the Evolving Digital World: How InMobi Solves Signal Loss for Advertisers

The ability to precisely identify and target individual users‍‍‍ – what the industry calls “addressability”– has long been at the heart of digital marketing. Unlike traditional analog media, addressable media allows advertisers to create personalized experiences that resonate with users on a granular level. But in recent years, the rise of privacy regulations and platform-level changes like Apple’s ATT framework have all but ensured the demise of persistent, operating system-level identifiers, making this once-straightforward task significantly more complex.

Marketers are now facing a “back to the future” moment. As privacy concerns have grown, legions of pundits have joined the chorus of backlash against the so-called “surveillance economy,” declaring the third-party cookie a false prophet, overstepping its humble origins. In turn, numerous advertising platforms have heralded the return of contextual targeting, once considered a relic of the past, as the savior of digital advertising’s future. But while this approach has its place, it's not the messiah advertisers are looking for.

Addressability's Resilience in the Digital Era

So, what do advertisers truly want? And, more importantly, how do they want to reach consumers? The truth is, even while there is a resurgence of contextual targeting chatter, advertising dollars have flooded into CTV and retail media networks - not because they’re revolutionary, but because they promise a preponderance of logged-in users and, therefore, index highly on addressability. For marketers – particularly brand advertisers – these channels offer more precision in targeting, making it easier for them to reach the right audience efficiently.

Enter Curation: The Next Step in Addressability

The ascendancy of “curation,” which is arguably the buzzword-du-jour, is the natural next step in the evolution of addressability.  In simplest terms curation uses data signals to package inventory in a way that enhances targeting precision and efficiency. At its core, curation seeks to better understand the propensities and preferences of each individual user. That’s not to say there isn’t room for contextual targeting in this paradigm, but more often than not, curation involves targeting defined audience profiles. It allows marketers to refine their strategies and zero in on specific audience profiles—beyond just context. So, while context still has a role to play, audience-based curation is quickly becoming the go-to approach in today’s fragmented digital ecosystem.

Skeptics argue that “curation” is nothing more than “ad targeting” repackaged under a different name. It is just not that simple.

Ad targeting has traditionally been the domain of the buy-side of the ecosystem, with DSPs making the decision on which ad requests to bid. In contrast, curation entails the migration of targeting decisions to the sell-side of the industry. But why is sell-side curation suddenly becoming so popular? Let’s break it down:

Why Curation Is Gaining Traction

There are compelling reasons why sell-side curation is increasingly taking hold:

• Signal Scarcity: As traditional identifiers (third-party cookies and IDFAs) become less reliable, the quest to find the right signal amidst the noise intensifies. Buy-side platforms must now evaluate more ad requests to reach their target audience, increasing infrastructure costs and reducing overall efficiency.
• QPS Allocation Limits: Many buy-side platforms have strict limits on queries per second (QPS), so they can only evaluate a finite volume of supply, exacerbating the signal scarcity problem. QPS limits result in missed opportunities for targeting relevant ad requests, translating into wasted ad spend.  
• Efficient Infrastructure: Beyond QPS limits, buy-side platforms still optimize spend decisions to drive more efficient traffic. We have seen first-hand that DSPs allocate more budget to supply platforms that drive more efficient traffic, measured by fill rates and auction win rates. By packaging inventory that meets specific audience requirements, curation minimizes inefficiencies in the processing of ad requests, ensuring optimal utilization of infrastructure resources.

The Unique Advantage of Sell-Side Curation 

Sell-side platforms have a unique advantage when it comes to addressing these inefficiencies:

• Efficient packaging of ad inventory: Sell-side platforms have full visibility of bid requests from the publishers with whom they work. This means they can "curate" the inventory and surface the most relevant ad impressions to buy-side platforms. By streamlining the evaluation of bid requests, they can deliver more precise targeting for advertisers and reduce infrastructure costs. Moreover, by reducing the volume of callouts to buy-side platforms required to deliver against marketing objectives, curation has the potential to dramatically reduce carbon emissions across the programmatic ecosystem.
• Consistent audience execution: Sell-side curation allows marketers to target the same inventory and audiences across multiple buy-side platforms, ensuring consistent campaign execution for advertisers that utilize multiple buying channels.
• Greater access to bid signals: By virtue of their proximity in the value chain, sell-side platforms have greater access to data signals from publishers, providing better visibility into where valuable audience signals are concentrated. While some buy-side platforms also have access to these signals, their ability to process, evaluate and utilize them fully is typically constrained.
• Better compliance with privacy restrictions: For certain verticals (pharma, in particular), marketers are increasingly wary of the liberties that some buy-side platforms take with the  modeling of user data. Curation offers an opportunity for data owners to exercise greater control over how their data is used to curate inventory supply.
• Better Economics: Buy-side platforms often add fees for audience targeting on top of the data cost as an essential component of their business model. These fees reduce the advertising dollars available for working media. In contrast, sell-side platforms are motivated to drive more media spending through their system by passing the expense of targeting data through at cost to advertisers without extracting additional margin. This allows marketers to allocate more of their budget to working media, maximizing the efficiency of their spending.

The Future of Addressability 

Sell-side curation is poised to revolutionize how marketers reach their audiences. By improving targeting precision and reducing infrastructure costs, it offers a powerful solution to the challenges of modern advertising. However, full adoption of this strategy is still evolving.

In Part 2 of this conversation, we’ll delve into the reasons why some marketers are still hesitant to fully embrace sell-side curation —and how InMobi is working to address these concerns.