Rob Beeler
Earlier this year, Permutive released its report, Reimagining Advertising in 2025: Curation, Collaboration, and GenAI. I had follow-up questions, which the Permutive leadership team helped answer.
Beeler: Permutive data shows that fewer than 15% of publishers have tested curated marketplaces. Is this due to a lack of education, limited awareness of the opportunity, or insufficient access to the necessary tools? What will drive that number higher?
Permutive: A lack of education is, honestly, a major reason why more publishers haven’t embraced curation. There has also been a significant learning curve on the buy side. However, as early adopters see results, overall demand will grow. We expect publisher participation to increase over the next 4–6 months. The reason is simple—curation allows publishers to monetize a significant portion of their currently unsold inventory at premium CPMs that the open marketplace doesn’t offer. Ultimately, rising buy-side demand will drive growth.
Beeler: It’s fascinating that curation presents both an opportunity and a threat to publishers—it speaks volumes about how the programmatic ecosystem operates. Can curation help move us beyond a system where companies exploit brands and publishers through a programmatic shell game?
Permutive: There’s a real opportunity to improve—to simplify ad buying for advertisers and enhance programmatic yield for publishers. The challenge lies in the wide spectrum of curation, spanning both the buy side and the sell side. Publishers face the risk of disintermediation as third-party classification is overlaid on OMP supply, while opacity around take rates, repackaging, and supply paths remains an issue.
We’re especially excited about our integrations with the curation platforms SSPs are developing to give publishers more control.
At its core, curation is about leveraging the wealth of high-fidelity data directly from the sell side to drive greater efficiency, addressability, and ultimately, ROAS—for the benefit of both publishers and advertisers. It’s far more than just contextual targeting in a DSP. If that were all it was, curation wouldn’t have gained so much traction over the past year.
Beeler: The report states, “In 2025, collaboration will become simpler, safer, and more scalable.” I’m sorry, but it doesn’t feel that way. How can such a fragmented ecosystem achieve all three?
Permutive: Obviously, we won’t eliminate fragmentation in 2025. However, the need to solve for cookie deprecation and OMP addressability collapse is moving the industry toward collaboration, and the shift to data collaboration platforms is reconnecting the ecosystem with a simpler, safer infrastructure. A major reason we’ll see more scalable collaboration is the limitations of traditional standalone clean rooms, which fail to deliver efficient and scaled open-web buying.
Major cloud providers have stood up data clean rooms and now provide an infrastructure that other vendors, like Permutive, can “compose” on. As more data collaboration happens via cloud providers, fragmentation will naturally decrease. This will also mean less data movement, which improves security.
Our perspective is that data collaboration should focus on identifying signals that are strong predictors of audience and performance. That perspective, along with reduced fragmentation, will make data collaboration more scalable—reducing operational burdens and expanding audience reach.
Beeler: It feels like the creation of manual segments has held back publishers from creating the segments brands are looking for. Is that where you see AI playing a growing role?
Permutive: It’s true that, due to time and resource constraints, defining and optimizing audience taxonomies has traditionally been a reactive, manual process that relies heavily on intuition. We’re already seeing AI play an increasingly critical role in data analysis. Some of the biggest areas of opportunity for AI include:
- Analyzing multiple data sources (ad server, SSP, etc.) to understand what is delivering and performing well
- Identifying changes in publisher data to uncover new audience and contextual opportunities proactively
- Understanding and summarizing demand based on RFP and CRM data
- Recommend strategies with the ability to suggest new ideas that require reasoning
- However, while AI will undoubtedly make a difference, a smart strategy keeps human oversight and control at the center.
You can download the Permutive Report here.