In today's complex and ever-evolving digital ad landscape, media agencies play a crucial role helping advertisers reach the best audiences for their campaigns. Agencies have a deep understanding of the trends, technologies and platforms emerging across the ad tech industry. That expertise helps them deliver greater insights and ROI for clients as they purchase inventory across a variety of ad formats best suited for their campaign goals.

To help agencies deliver on their goals, we're introducing new curation capabilities across Google Ad Manager inventory to help identify and purchase the best publisher inventory and audiences. This solution builds on our existing agency tools that help streamline workflows for reporting, discovery, forecasting and packaging inventory, and makes it easier for agencies to manage their direct deals with publishers.

Data and inventory curation made easy for agencies

Marketers face the challenge of reaching the right audiences across a fragmented internet. This fragmentation is amplified with inventory like Connected TV, where cross-device viewing and a lack of unified identity signals make it harder to effectively reach desired audiences. To help brands navigate this, agencies can benefit from new ways to buy audiences and curated inventory.

That’s why we’re launching curation, a new capability that simplifies how agencies discover and activate their ideal inventory. It allows them to easily connect with trusted partners to explore curated inventory packages and activate data segments directly within their agency account. By curating inventory and audiences on the sellside, agencies tap into a wealth of insights that can fuel more accurate forecasting and increased match rates.

We also heard agencies’ feedback on simplifying operations. Agencies can skip the hassle of managing payments to data providers and inventory curators — Google Ad Manager will handle billing, eliminating the need to deal with separate invoices or payment processes.

Curation already supports Audigent, IAS, Liveramp, Lotame, Multilocal, Permutive, PrimeAudience and Scope3. This enhanced control and flexibility in selecting data segments and curating inventory opens new possibilities for brands and agencies.

As Travis Clinger, Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer at LiveRamp, explains, “Curation helps brands and agencies achieve better connectivity and signal, accelerating the adoption of cutting-edge solutions that drive results across display, CTV and beyond.”

We're excited to see the innovative ways agencies are using curation. For example, Brenda Tuohig, Chief Commercial Officer at Scope3, notes that it helps agencies "make their campaigns more carbon efficient and effective by selecting lower-emission inventory segments," calling it "an all-around win for the agency, as it supports sustainability goals while boosting performance.”

Programmatic buying streamlined for agencies

Curation builds on our ongoing work to help agencies get more value from publisher inventory by streamlining programmatic advertising operations. We already provide agencies with a clear view of performance, through a unified UI where they can report and analyze campaigns across participating DSPs. This helps them identify trends, find optimization opportunities and have more informed discussions with publishers about spend commitments.

We also provide agencies powerful discovery, forecasting and packaging capabilities across all participating DSPs in one central location. For instance, agencies can negotiate directly with publishers to create a single deal ID that works across all their buying platforms — currently available for Preferred Deals and Private Auctions via Display & Video 360 and Yahoo, with support for Programmatic Guaranteed and other DSPs coming in the months ahead.

As Chandra Cirulnick, VP, Global Supply Partnerships at Yahoo DSP, notes, "Yahoo is continuously looking for ways to better adapt and support our agency partners. We're happy to integrate Google’s agency solutions to make it easier for agencies to purchase publisher inventory when transacting through our DSP."

We're continually exploring ways to better support the agency-publisher relationship. Agencies can learn how to enhance curation, streamline workflows and gain greater access to data by speaking with their Google representative. Stay tuned for more updates.