The Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), Germany’s principal digital economic system commerce affiliation, revealed a 12-page whitepaper devoted solely to an idea the programmatic promoting business has been debating for years with out a settled definition: curation. Launched on February 26, 2026, from Berlin, the paper addresses SSPs, DSPs, information suppliers, resellers, publishers, businesses, and advertisers concurrently – a scope that displays simply how deeply fragmented the business’s understanding of curation has turn out to be.

The whitepaper was produced by the BVDW’s Lab “Curation” contained in the Working Group Information Tech & Economic system. 13 authors contributed, drawn from corporations together with BCN Group, Microsoft Promoting, WPP Media, Ströer SSP GmbH, AudienceProject GmbH, United Web Media GmbH, Kleinanzeigen.de, Index Change, Digital Minds, Nexida GmbH, and Mediaplus Realtime. The breadth of contributors is deliberate – the definition itself was developed by a collaborative course of grounded in precise observe examples moderately than theoretical frameworks.

“Curation is a central reply to the present challenges in programmatic promoting. With the whitepaper, we’re making certain a uniform market understanding and offering clear pointers for accountable implementation,” stated Christopher Reher of Nexida, who chairs the Working Group Information Tech & Economic system at BVDW.

What the BVDW says curation really is

The doc opens by addressing what it describes as a widespread inconsistency: curation has been interpreted otherwise by completely different market individuals. The BVDW’s definition, arrived at by the lab’s collaborative classes, reads as follows: “Curation in programmatic promoting refers back to the focused choice, mixture, and enrichment of media inventories and information indicators into tailor-made packages which might be exactly aligned to particular communication targets. Along with inventories, viewers segments, contextual information, and different related indicators are more and more getting used for curation.”

That definition issues as a result of it attracts a agency line between curation and easily shopping for programmatic stock on an open market. Slightly than particular person auction-level purchases from an open alternate, curation assembles pre-configured, curated packages. These packages can mix premium writer inventories, viewers segments (first-party, second-party, third-party, or modelled audiences), contextual information similar to key phrases, semantic evaluation, and model security indicators, plus extra information layers overlaying geography, time, system kind, climate, and cross-device data.

The BVDW’s work lands in a market the place the time period has attracted each real enthusiasm and appreciable skepticism. Industry executives clashed publicly over curation’s merits at IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day in July 2025, with some arguing the idea represented a real structural shift and others suggesting it was largely rebranded personal market shopping for. The BVDW whitepaper doesn’t resolve that debate however at the very least offers the business a standard vocabulary to have it.

Promote-side focus and position definitions

One of many whitepaper’s clearest structural decisions is its deliberate give attention to sell-side curation. The BVDW locations curation technically throughout the SSP or in a devoted curation layer sitting on the sell-side of the programmatic provide chain – the purpose the place stock is chosen, enriched with information, and handed to DSPs as curated deal packages.

The paper identifies 4 distinct curator archetypes. Expertise suppliers sit on each side of the method, supplying the technical infrastructure for curation whereas additionally providing deal packages themselves. Publishers can contribute their very own inventories and act as curators instantly, opening extra monetisation paths. Media patrons – each manufacturers and businesses – can curate in self-service mode based on their very own marketing campaign KPIs. Information suppliers and specialist third-party companies carry proprietary datasets and might supply curated offers by SSPs.

Every archetype carries its personal trade-offs. In accordance with the whitepaper, expertise suppliers acquire effectivity, strategic relevance, higher decision-making by customized bidding algorithms, extra income from characteristic charges, and economies of scale – however face improvement prices, technical overhead, and provide chain elongation. Publishers acquire extra monetisation potential and direct relationships with patrons however require SSP entry and should construct curation experience themselves, with the attendant guide market effort. Companies and advertisers acquire excessive agility, exact price and efficiency administration, clear deal constructions, larger model security, higher viewers scalability by matching, and the power to function throughout DSPs concurrently – although they face fragmentation throughout completely different SSP interfaces and reporting techniques, and equally should develop curation data internally. Information and meta curators unlock extra information monetisation by unique viewers packages bundled with inventories, however add one other participant to the availability chain, rising fragmentation threat.

The adoption of curation by Microsoft Advertising into its partner programme in February 2025 illustrated how these roles are formalising throughout main platforms. SSPs have been quietly expanding their curation infrastructure since at least late 2024, with Equativ’s October 2024 evaluation noting that match charge losses between platforms sometimes vary from 40 to 70 % – a determine that makes the case for preserving extra information and decisioning on the availability aspect.

Technical structure

The whitepaper dedicates a piece to the technical underpinnings of curation, grounding the idea in requirements that exist already moderately than proposing new ones from scratch. OpenRTB handles the standardised public sale course of between demand and supply-side platforms. The Open Measurement SDK supplies uniform measurement of parameters together with viewability and fraud threat. The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) from IAB Europe manages person consent by consent administration platforms. Advertisements.txt and Sellers.json keep provide chain transparency.

The curation course of itself follows an outlined sequence. Earlier than any curation takes place, viewers and contextual information are enriched with extra context or behavioural indicators. These enriched indicators are then transformed into segments and matched with acceptable inventories. The result’s a curated data-inventory bundle made out there by standardised deal IDs in DSPs. Advertisers and businesses then entry these offers to profit from exact marketing campaign supply, decreased irrelevant impressions, and visibility into information and stock sources.

The whitepaper attracts a pointy distinction between classical and progressive approaches to curation. Classical strategies contain guide placement choice, fastened offers with particular person publishers, a main give attention to stock availability, and restricted scalability. Modern approaches use AI-supported choice primarily based on information and contextual indicators, dynamic and audience-specific PMP offers involving information curation and collaboration, a give attention to viewers relevance and model security, and scalability by platform integrations.

That technical distinction connects on to broader requirements work already underway. IAB Tech Lab released its Deals API specification version 1.0 for public comment on December 5, 2025, exactly to deal with the guide entry and transparency gaps in curated programmatic offers. The specification defines object constructions for deal phrases, stock particulars, curation data, and purchaser standing – work that instantly helps the form of standardised deal packaging the BVDW whitepaper advocates.

Particular use circumstances

The paper identifies six concrete use circumstances. Stock choice includes focused number of quality-verified publishers primarily based on outlined standards similar to viewability, model security, efficiency, or viewers match. Information enrichment provides contextual information, viewers segments, or efficiency metrics by information supplier integrations, considerably upgrading stock worth. Information Clear Rooms allow privacy-compliant linking of first-party and third-party information with curated inventories throughout central curation marketplaces. Curated marketplaces create selective shopping for environments aligned to particular marketing campaign objectives, together with effectivity good points in buying and troubleshooting. Deal libraries present structured collections of standardised deal packages organised by vertical or viewers kind, enabling environment friendly reserving and reuse. OTS optimisation makes use of ID-based frequency management and contextual supply to extend visibility per contact, bettering promoting effectiveness and opportunity-to-see values.

Three specialised stock classes obtain specific consideration. Inexperienced media curation includes licensed environmentally-responsible environments, with third-party certification suppliers additionally delivering CO2 emissions reporting. The whitepaper is candid a few complication: the extra technical complexity and vitality consumption launched by an additional platform within the bidding course of can scale back the precise sustainability acquire. Retail media connects retail information similar to procuring baskets and product pursuits with curated stock to optimise gross sales campaigns. Contextual curation achieves exact content material matching with out private information focusing on – an strategy rising in relevance as European retail media spending reached €13.7 billion in 2024 with 21.1% growth and as advertisers seek for focusing on mechanisms that don’t rely on third-party identifiers.

Regulatory necessities

The BVDW explicitly addresses GDPR compliance. The whitepaper notes that the required regulatory infrastructure is normally already in place inside normal programmatic marketing campaign setups, which means curation sometimes requires solely modest extra compliance effort. That stated, it identifies two areas the place particular consideration is warranted. First, acquiring legitimate person consent for every processing function. Second, clarifying tasks between taking part events underneath Articles 26 and 28 of the GDPR – joint controller preparations and processor agreements.

The place a number of events cooperate in curation, it’s important that every social gathering is aware of precisely what information it receives, for what function, on what authorized foundation, and with what information safety accountability. Information Clear Rooms are offered because the privacy-compliant resolution for multi-party information collaboration, offering safe impartial environments the place publishers and advertisers can merge and analyse first-party information in a managed means.

The TCF from IAB Europe stays the foundational compliance mechanism. The whitepaper additionally cites voluntary business codes from BVDW and IAB organisations, the Digital Providers Act, the Political Advertisements Act, and the EU AI Act as contributing to accountable market practices. Technical specs together with advertisements.txt, sellers.json, and the SupplyChain Object are offered as trust-building instruments for provide chain transparency. This regulatory context connects on to ongoing work: IAB Europe’s TCF framework underwent a Belgian court ruling in May 2025 that clarified the organisation’s joint controller standing particularly for TC String processing, whereas Google mandated migration to TCF v2.3 by February 2026 – a deadline that falls in the identical month because the BVDW publication.

AI and future outlook

The whitepaper’s forward-looking part addresses synthetic intelligence instantly. AI is altering client behaviour, shifting how customers discover and consider data, and more and more transferring selections into closed, AI-supported environments. The paper acknowledges this creates tangible results on information flows, attain, and measurability. Established indicators lose relevance. New sources emerge. Present constructions fragment.

On the similar time, the BVDW argues curation is especially well-positioned to soak up these adjustments. Its structure permits information streams to be related, relevance to be redefined, and rising complexity transformed into usable insights. AI can speed up the detection of development or decline developments inside particular person information indicators, enabling sooner adaptation and less complicated harmonisation throughout completely different information taxonomies.

The whitepaper’s most pointed declare is available in its conclusion: curation is described as a key expertise of the subsequent promoting era and as a possible central management unit in an AI-governed web the place autonomous brokers function. The doc calls it not merely a bridge expertise however “the working system of a brand new promoting logic – formed by context, effectivity, transparency and management.”

That framing aligns with broader business evaluation. Agentic AI’s potential to bypass traditional DSP functions was documented at PPC Land in July 2025, with Ari Paparo arguing that automated marketing campaign administration might disrupt your entire programmatic stack. IAB Tech Lab’s January 2025 agentic roadmap explicitly positioned requirements like OpenRTB as the inspiration for agentic deployment – the identical requirements the BVDW whitepaper cites as curation’s technical spine.

The sustainability dimension seems prominently within the whitepaper’s sustainability part. On the ecological aspect, filtering out irrelevant bid requests earlier than they’re despatched to DSPs reduces information load alongside the availability path and consequently reduces vitality consumption. On the social aspect, focused stock choice improves model security and ensures fairer writer compensation, directing a bigger share of promoting budgets to publishers instantly moderately than to made-for-advertising websites.

The BVDW publication is critical for a number of causes past its German market context. Germany ranks among the many three largest European digital promoting markets, alongside the UK and France, accounting for a considerable share of the continent’s €118.9 billion in digital advertising spend recorded in 2024. A German business affiliation establishing definitional requirements carries weight throughout the European market.

Extra virtually, the whitepaper addresses a structural downside: the identical phrase means various things to completely different individuals within the programmatic provide chain. Industry adoption of IAB Tech Lab’s curation framework accelerated through 2025, following the organisation’s December 2024 formal requirements announcement, however adoption of technical requirements and adoption of shared conceptual understanding are two various things. The BVDW paper makes an attempt the latter.

The Magnite ClearLine platform’s evolution in October 2025 unified curation and activation right into a single platform. OpenX launched its curation platform for agencies in July 2025. Programmatic audio was predicted to prioritise curation above scale in 2026. Towards that backdrop of quickly transferring industrial implementations, a transparent definitional framework has actual operational worth for businesses making an attempt to guage vendor claims, for publishers making an attempt to know what management they really retain, and for advertisers making an attempt to attach curation guarantees to marketing campaign outcomes.

The BVDW whitepaper is on the market as a free obtain at bvdw.org. It runs to 12 pages and was revealed on February 26, 2026, from Berlin. Contact for additional data is Nicole Dreyer, Senior Programme Supervisor, at [email protected].

Timeline

Abstract

Who: The Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), Germany’s principal digital economic system commerce affiliation, with a 13-person authoring crew drawn from BCN Group, Microsoft Promoting, WPP Media, Ströer SSP GmbH, AudienceProject GmbH, United Web Media GmbH, Kleinanzeigen.de, Index Change, Digital Minds, Nexida GmbH, and Mediaplus Realtime.

What: A 12-page whitepaper titled “Curation im programmatischen Ökosystem” (Curation within the programmatic ecosystem) that establishes a consensus definition of curation in programmatic promoting, maps the roles of 4 distinct curator sorts, explains the technical structure constructed on OpenRTB, Open Measurement SDK, and TCF, particulars six use circumstances together with inexperienced media, retail media, and contextual curation, and units out GDPR compliance necessities together with consent administration and Article 26/28 tasks.

When: Printed February 26, 2026, from Berlin.

The place: The BVDW’s Working Group Information Tech & Economic system, headquartered at Obentrautstraße 55, 10963 Berlin, produced the paper as a information for the German and broader European programmatic promoting market.

Why: The business had been working with out a shared definition of curation, creating fragmentation in how SSPs, DSPs, businesses, publishers, and information suppliers understood and communicated in regards to the observe. The BVDW aimed to determine uniform market understanding, present regulatory orientation underneath GDPR, and place curation as a scalable and legally sound part of programmatic promoting – significantly as AI-driven adjustments to person behaviour and promoting infrastructure improve the strain to restructure how stock is packaged and delivered.


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