Ryan Maynard, SVP, Programmatic Sales Operations at Raptive and a longtime critic of programmatic curation, was unexpectedly transformed by conversations with industry peers.
With all the hype around deal curation, it’s only natural for there to be some haters.
You’ve heard the arguments: Curation is just a reinvention of the old ad network model. Or it’s just a way for SSPs to collect the curation-related data fees that have long fattened DSPs’ pockets.
Ryan Maynard, the SVP of Programmatic Sales Operations at publisher monetization platform Raptive, was, until recently, deeply skeptical of curation and the industry’s shift to activating curated audiences within SSPs. He viewed this new method of sell-side curation as a mechanism for SSPs to extract hidden fees and bypass direct publisher relationships.
But Maynard’s skepticism gradually evolved into a nuanced appreciation for strategic, performance-driven curation.
Maynard previously viewed curation deals as inefficient, offering inflated CPMs and obscuring publishers’ access to the buyer. However, he realized that if a curator is delivering on performance KPIs like click-through rate or return on ad spend, then high CPMs aren’t necessarily a problem.
Now, Maynard sees the curation craze as an opportunity for publishers to rethink their direct sales strategy.
“We need to operate like curators ourselves,” he said, making performance, not pricing, the focal point.
Instead of pushing for pricing efficiency, Maynard now plans to center his curation sales pitch on meeting buyers’ goals and KPIs. He also plans to request access to DSP logs and performance data to better understand what parts of Raptive’s ad inventory are driving outcomes.
Curation Gets Sertified
What prompted Maynard’s pivot on curation?
A presentation at last month’s Possible event in Miami featured a slide on curation that really stuck with Maynard. It clearly outlined what curation isn’t, and helped crystallize the difference between value-added curation and practices that resemble old-school ad networks.
Curation is meaningful when it’s additive, Maynard said—when it brings in new budgets, new buyer relationships, or better performance.
For example, Maynard pointed to Raptive’s partnership with Sertify, which focuses on verifying minority-owned businesses.
Before working with Sertify, many of Raptive’s diverse-owned sites were self-declared. But now, Sertify vets the sites’ ownership status and helps route spend earmarked for diverse-owned publishers to these sites, when it would have otherwise bypassed Raptive’s network entirely.
Because Raptive has cultivated a relationship with Sertify, it understands the needs of Raptive’s buyers, their performance goals, and how each curated deal is structured. And Sertify is helping Raptive’s publishers connect to incremental demand they wouldn’t have access to on their own. That’s the kind of collaboration that defines good curation by Maynard’s standards.
“This collaboration is possible because publishers need to actively opt in and engage with Serify in order to get their minority-owned status verified,” said Dennis Tze, Co-founder and CEO, Sertify. “As a result, we have a deeper and more collaborative relationship with our supply partners and publishers.”
Tze added that Sertify’s goal is to drive more inclusive investments and deliver that investment across a larger number of publishers. “We bring additive demand by providing a layer of authentication to the industry, so brands can easily and confidently increase their inclusive media investments,” he said.
Curation Done Right—and Wrong
Although Maynard has changed his mind on some types of curation, there’s still plenty about the practice he would like to fix.
The current structure of programmatic systems contributes to the lack of transparency publishers have into curated deals, Maynard said.
“We’re sending a bunch of bid requests to the SSP, which translates and sends them to the DSP,”he said. “But it’s on the DSP side where a lot of things break down.”
Valuable signals, like whether a user added something to their cart or reached a thank-you page, often don’t make it back to the publisher, Maynard said.”None of that conversion data tends to get passed back to us. It stays with the DSP or the buyer. So if we want that insight, we have to go to each buyer individually and ask, ‘Can you share this with us?'”
Some buyers are willing to share, especially if they want efficient performance outcomes. But even then, making sense of the data and optimizing around it falls on the publisher.
“That’s where the curator has to step in and do their job,” Maynard said. “It’s not just about moving spend from open auction into a deal ID. It’s about bringing in something new.”
Whose Deal Is It Anyway?
But transparency is still a sticking point for publishers when it comes to curation.
“All my publisher friends say the same thing—it comes back to control,” Maynard said. “We want to know what inventory is being curated, the buyer’s goals, and what data or targeting is being used. And ultimately, we want to be able to opt in or out.”
Right now, that’s not always the case. “You’re opted in by default and stuck unless you notice the deal,” he said. “There’s usually no relationship between the curator and the publisher in those cases.”
But from Maynard’s perspective, curators like Sertify that cultivate a relationship with the publisher have a better approach.
For instance, to enable more publishers to access advertiser demand for minority-owned sites, Sertify includes the cost of certification in the media CPM and has set its fees at the low end of industry benchmarks. In contrast, government organizations that offer certifications for minority ownership charge their fees upfront.
Outside of transparency, Maynard has a lingering frustration for the misleading framing of “zero-fee” curation. He maintained that even when curators claim no added fees, the SSP often takes a substantial cut, sometimes as high as 20%.
For publishers with direct SSP relationships, that fee is typically closer to 5–10%, which means a significantly higher net revenue for the publisher.
When buyers are genuinely focused on maximizing the amount of their spend that goes to the publisher, it makes far more sense to route spend through a direct publisher deal than through a curated one layered with hidden costs, Maynard said
Certain opaque SPO arrangements between ad agencies and SSPs further complicate matters, he said
For example, some preferred deals, in which buyers get a first crack at buying certain curated publisher inventory, are often executed through principal buying arms like IPG’s Orion, which operate off the bid stream and outside of any public analysis.
Agencies negotiate discounts with SSPs and steer spend through curated marketplaces, bypassing publishers entirely. Even long-standing publisher direct deals are under pressure, as SSPs convince agencies to consolidate through their preferred paths instead.
For publishers, that shift reduces revenue, erodes hard-earned relationships with agency teams, and fragments communication across the buying chain.
But publishers can push back against the lack of transparency in some curation strategies by pressuring SSPs to expose their take rates and the take rates of curators, Maynard said. And publishers can also push back on bad actors by demonstrating a more positive model of publisher-driven curation.
“I’m inspired to start operating like a good curator,” said Maynard, “with the simple focus on driving to a performance outcome.”