Programmatic curation
Most of the open web isn't worth bidding on. We decide what is.
Smart Media Buy is a curation partner. We assemble inventory, data and business rules into deal IDs on the sell side, so your DSP bids on supply that has already been filtered — instead of filtering it after you've paid for it.
Where we sit
Curation happens before the auction, not after the invoice.
A curated deal is assembled on the supply side — inventory selected, data applied, rules enforced — and handed to your DSP as a single deal ID. Your traders target one line item instead of managing a thousand exclusions.
We hold seats with the exchanges rather than reselling inventory. Your existing DSP, your existing buying team, your existing reporting — one new deal ID in it.
What we curate on
Three inputs, applied together.
A site list in a spreadsheet is not curation. Every package we build combines all three of these, and we will tell you which one is doing the work.
Audience & context
First-party, commerce and contextual signal applied at the impression, matched on the sell side where match rates hold up better than they do downstream.
- Seller-side segment match
- Page and video-level context
- Cookieless addressable paths
Supply quality
MFA and made-for-arbitrage domains removed, resold and duplicated paths collapsed, ads.txt and sellers.json checked against what the bid request actually claims.
- MFA and cloned-domain exclusion
- Direct-path preference
- Declared vs. observed seller checks
Business logic
The rules that usually live in a trader's head, written into the deal: viewability and completion floors, format and position constraints, frequency and dayparting.
- Viewability / completion floors
- Format, size and position rules
- Frequency and daypart caps
How a deal gets built
Four steps, roughly two weeks.
This is a real sequence — each step depends on the one before it. Most of the elapsed time is deal sync and trafficking on your side, not build time on ours.
Define the outcome
We start from what the campaign is judged on — not the targeting spec. Reach at a CPM ceiling, completion rate, qualified traffic, in-store visits: the metric decides which of the three inputs above we lean on.
Assemble the package
Inventory selected across our exchange seats, segments applied, rules written in. We forecast available impressions and a clearing range before anything is trafficked, so the deal isn't scoped on hope.
Sync and traffic
The deal ID syncs to your DSP seat. Your team traffics it like any other PMP. No new contract with each publisher, no tags, no engineering work on your side.
Read it and revise
Win rate, bid density, clearing price and delivery by domain, reported back at the level the deal was built on — so when something underdelivers you can see whether it was the floor, the audience or the supply.
What lands in your seat
One deal ID, fully specified.
- Works in the DSP you already use. Deal IDs sync to the major buying platforms. Nothing about your workflow changes.
- Domain-level delivery reporting. You see where it ran, what it cleared at, and what didn't bid — not a rolled-up summary.
- Revisable mid-flight. Floors, exclusions and segments can change without re-trafficking the line.
- Display, video, CTV and audio. Built per channel rather than one package stretched across all of them.
- Deal ID
- SMB-8QF2-4417
- Type
- Private auction
- Channel
- Video — instream
- Geo
- US, national
- Floor
- $14.00 CPM
- Completion floor
- ≥ 70%
- Supply path
- Direct only
- MFA exclusion
- Applied
- Curation fee
- Disclosed, flat
On fees
Ours is a line item, not a spread.
Curation has an unflattering reputation in some quarters, and it's earned: too many curators add a fee for loading a site list into an exchange. Three commitments, in writing, before any deal goes live.
Stated, not derived
A flat, disclosed fee agreed up front. We don't take a variable margin between what you pay and what the publisher is paid.
Visible in the chain
We're declared as an intermediary in sellers.json and the SupplyChain object. You can audit the path we sit in.
Drop it if it isn't earning
If a curated deal isn't beating the open-auction benchmark you'd otherwise buy, we'd rather you turn it off than keep paying for it.
Get in touch
Tell us the outcome. We'll scope the deal.
Send the channel, the geo, the metric you're judged on and the budget range. We'll come back with a forecast and a proposed package — no deck required.