Germany's BVDW published a 12-page whitepaper in February 2026 on curation in programmatic advertising, setting role definitions, technical standards, and GDPR guidelines.
The Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), Germany's principal digital economy trade association, published a 12-page whitepaper dedicated entirely to a concept the programmatic advertising industry has been debating for years without a settled definition: curation. Released on February 26, 2026, from Berlin, the paper addresses SSPs, DSPs, data providers, resellers, publishers, agencies, and advertisers simultaneously - a scope that reflects just how deeply fragmented the industry's understanding of curation has become.
The whitepaper was produced by the BVDW's Lab "Curation" inside the Working Group Data Tech & Economy. Thirteen authors contributed, drawn from companies including BCN Group, Microsoft Advertising, WPP Media, Ströer SSP GmbH, AudienceProject GmbH, United Internet Media GmbH, Kleinanzeigen.de, Index Exchange, Virtual Minds, Nexida GmbH, and Mediaplus Realtime. The breadth of contributors is deliberate - the definition itself was developed through a collaborative process grounded in actual practice examples rather than theoretical frameworks.
"Curation is a central answer to the current challenges in programmatic advertising. With the whitepaper, we are ensuring a uniform market understanding and providing clear guidelines for responsible implementation," said Christopher Reher of Nexida, who chairs the Working Group Data Tech & Economy at BVDW.
The document opens by addressing what it describes as a widespread inconsistency: curation has been interpreted differently by different market participants. The BVDW's definition, arrived at through the lab's collaborative sessions, reads as follows: "Curation in programmatic advertising refers to the targeted selection, combination, and enrichment of media inventories and data signals into tailored packages that are precisely aligned to specific communication objectives. In addition to inventories, audience segments, contextual data, and other relevant signals are increasingly being used for curation."
That definition matters because it draws a firm line between curation and simply buying programmatic inventory on an open marketplace. Rather than individual auction-level purchases from an open exchange, curation assembles pre-configured, curated packages. Those packages can combine premium publisher inventories, audience segments (first-party, second-party, third-party, or modelled audiences), contextual data such as keywords, semantic analysis, and brand safety signals, plus additional data layers covering geography, time, device type, weather, and cross-device information.
The BVDW's work lands in a market where the term has attracted both genuine enthusiasm and considerable skepticism. Industry executives clashed publicly over curation's merits at IAB Europe's Virtual Programmatic Day in July 2025, with some arguing the concept represented a genuine structural shift and others suggesting it was largely rebranded private marketplace buying. The BVDW whitepaper does not resolve that debate but at least gives the industry a common vocabulary to have it.
One of the whitepaper's clearest structural choices is its deliberate focus on sell-side curation. The BVDW places curation technically within the SSP or in a dedicated curation layer sitting on the sell-side of the programmatic supply chain - the point where inventory is selected, enriched with data, and passed to DSPs as curated deal packages.
The paper identifies four distinct curator archetypes. Technology providers sit on both sides of the process, supplying the technical infrastructure for curation while also offering deal packages themselves. Publishers can contribute their own inventories and act as curators directly, opening additional monetisation paths. Media buyers - both brands and agencies - can curate in self-service mode according to their own campaign KPIs. Data providers and specialist third-party services bring proprietary datasets and can offer curated deals through SSPs.
Each archetype carries its own trade-offs. According to the whitepaper, technology providers gain efficiency, strategic relevance, better decision-making through custom bidding algorithms, additional revenue from feature fees, and economies of scale - but face development costs, technical overhead, and supply chain elongation. Publishers gain additional monetisation potential and direct relationships with buyers but require SSP access and must build curation expertise themselves, with the attendant manual market effort. Agencies and advertisers gain high agility, precise cost and performance management, transparent deal structures, higher brand safety, greater audience scalability through matching, and the ability to operate across DSPs simultaneously - though they face fragmentation across different SSP interfaces and reporting systems, and similarly must develop curation knowledge internally. Data and meta curators unlock additional data monetisation through exclusive audience packages bundled with inventories, but add another participant to the supply chain, increasing fragmentation risk.
The adoption of curation by Microsoft Advertising into its partner programme in February 2025 illustrated how these roles are formalising across major platforms. SSPs have been quietly expanding their curation infrastructure since at least late 2024, with Equativ's October 2024 analysis noting that match rate losses between platforms typically range from 40 to 70 percent - a figure that makes the case for keeping more data and decisioning on the supply side.
The whitepaper dedicates a section to the technical underpinnings of curation, grounding the concept in standards that already exist rather than proposing new ones from scratch. OpenRTB handles the standardised auction process between demand and supply-side platforms. The Open Measurement SDK provides uniform measurement of parameters including viewability and fraud risk. The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) from IAB Europe manages user consent through consent management platforms. Ads.txt and Sellers.json maintain supply chain transparency.
The curation process itself follows a defined sequence. Before any curation takes place, audience and contextual data are enriched with additional context or behavioural signals. These enriched signals are then converted into segments and matched with appropriate inventories. The result is a curated data-inventory package made available through standardised deal IDs in DSPs. Advertisers and agencies then access those deals to benefit from precise campaign delivery, reduced irrelevant impressions, and visibility into data and inventory sources.
The whitepaper draws a sharp contrast between classical and innovative approaches to curation. Classical methods involve manual placement selection, fixed deals with individual publishers, a primary focus on inventory availability, and limited scalability. Innovative approaches use AI-supported selection based on data and contextual signals, dynamic and audience-specific PMP deals involving data curation and collaboration, a focus on audience relevance and brand safety, and scalability through platform integrations.
That technical distinction connects directly to broader standards work already underway. IAB Tech Lab released its Deals API specification version 1.0 for public comment on December 5, 2025, precisely to address the manual entry and transparency gaps in curated programmatic deals. The specification defines object structures for deal terms, inventory details, curation information, and buyer status - work that directly supports the kind of standardised deal packaging the BVDW whitepaper advocates.
The paper identifies six concrete use cases. Inventory selection involves targeted selection of quality-verified publishers based on defined criteria such as viewability, brand safety, performance, or audience fit. Data enrichment adds contextual data, audience segments, or performance metrics through data provider integrations, significantly upgrading inventory value. Data Clean Rooms enable privacy-compliant linking of first-party and third-party data with curated inventories across central curation marketplaces. Curated marketplaces create selective buying environments aligned to specific campaign goals, including efficiency gains in purchasing and troubleshooting. Deal libraries provide structured collections of standardised deal packages organised by vertical or audience type, enabling efficient booking and reuse. OTS optimisation uses ID-based frequency control and contextual delivery to increase visibility per contact, improving advertising effectiveness and opportunity-to-see values.
Three specialised inventory categories receive particular attention. Green media curation involves certified environmentally-responsible environments, with third-party certification providers also delivering CO2 emissions reporting. The whitepaper is candid about a complication: the additional technical complexity and energy consumption introduced by an extra platform in the bidding process can reduce the actual sustainability gain. Retail media connects retail data such as shopping baskets and product interests with curated inventory to optimise sales campaigns. Contextual curation achieves precise content matching without personal data targeting - an approach growing in relevance as European retail media spending reached €13.7 billion in 2024 with 21.1% growth and as advertisers search for targeting mechanisms that do not depend on third-party identifiers.
The BVDW explicitly addresses GDPR compliance. The whitepaper notes that the necessary regulatory infrastructure is usually already in place within standard programmatic campaign setups, meaning curation typically requires only modest additional compliance effort. That said, it identifies two areas where specific attention is warranted. First, obtaining valid user consent for each processing purpose. Second, clarifying responsibilities between participating parties under Articles 26 and 28 of the GDPR - joint controller arrangements and processor agreements.
Where multiple parties cooperate in curation, it is essential that each party knows exactly what data it receives, for what purpose, on what legal basis, and with what data protection responsibility. Data Clean Rooms are presented as the privacy-compliant solution for multi-party data collaboration, providing secure neutral environments where publishers and advertisers can merge and analyse first-party data in a controlled way.
The TCF from IAB Europe remains the foundational compliance mechanism. The whitepaper also cites voluntary industry codes from BVDW and IAB organisations, the Digital Services Act, the Political Ads Act, and the EU AI Act as contributing to responsible market practices. Technical specifications including ads.txt, sellers.json, and the SupplyChain Object are presented as trust-building tools for supply chain transparency. This regulatory context connects directly to ongoing work: IAB Europe's TCF framework underwent a Belgian court ruling in May 2025 that clarified the organisation's joint controller status specifically for TC String processing, while Google mandated migration to TCF v2.3 by February 2026 - a deadline that falls in the same month as the BVDW publication.
The whitepaper's forward-looking section addresses artificial intelligence directly. AI is changing consumer behaviour, shifting how users find and evaluate information, and increasingly moving decisions into closed, AI-supported environments. The paper acknowledges this creates tangible effects on data flows, reach, and measurability. Established signals lose relevance. New sources emerge. Existing structures fragment.
At the same time, the BVDW argues curation is particularly well-positioned to absorb these changes. Its architecture allows data streams to be connected, relevance to be redefined, and growing complexity converted into usable insights. AI can accelerate the detection of growth or decline trends within individual data signals, enabling faster adaptation and simpler harmonisation across different data taxonomies.
The whitepaper's most pointed claim comes in its conclusion: curation is described as a key technology of the next advertising generation and as a potential central control unit in an AI-governed internet where autonomous agents operate. The document calls it not merely a bridge technology but "the operating system of a new advertising logic - shaped by context, efficiency, transparency and control."
That framing aligns with broader industry analysis. Agentic AI's potential to bypass traditional DSP functions was documented at PPC Land in July 2025, with Ari Paparo arguing that automated campaign management could disrupt the entire programmatic stack. IAB Tech Lab's January 2025 agentic roadmap explicitly positioned standards like OpenRTB as the foundation for agentic deployment - the same standards the BVDW whitepaper cites as curation's technical backbone.
The sustainability dimension appears prominently in the whitepaper's sustainability section. On the ecological side, filtering out irrelevant bid requests before they are sent to DSPs reduces data load along the supply path and consequently reduces energy consumption. On the social side, targeted inventory selection improves brand safety and ensures fairer publisher compensation, directing a larger share of advertising budgets to publishers directly rather than to made-for-advertising sites.
The BVDW publication is significant for several reasons beyond its German market context. Germany ranks among the three largest European digital advertising markets, alongside the UK and France, accounting for a substantial share of the continent's €118.9 billion in digital advertising spend recorded in 2024. A German industry association establishing definitional standards carries weight across the European market.
More practically, the whitepaper addresses a structural problem: the same word means different things to different participants in the programmatic supply chain. Industry adoption of IAB Tech Lab's curation framework accelerated through 2025, following the organisation's December 2024 formal standards announcement, but adoption of technical standards and adoption of shared conceptual understanding are two different things. The BVDW paper attempts the latter.
The Magnite ClearLine platform's evolution in October 2025 unified curation and activation 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. Against that backdrop of rapidly moving commercial implementations, a clear definitional framework has real operational value for agencies trying to evaluate vendor claims, for publishers trying to understand what control they actually retain, and for advertisers trying to connect curation promises to campaign outcomes.
The BVDW whitepaper is available as a free download at bvdw.org. It runs to 12 pages and was published on February 26, 2026, from Berlin. Contact for further information is Nicole Dreyer, Senior Programme Manager, at [email protected].
Who: The Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), Germany's principal digital economy trade association, with a 13-person authoring team drawn from BCN Group, Microsoft Advertising, WPP Media, Ströer SSP GmbH, AudienceProject GmbH, United Internet Media GmbH, Kleinanzeigen.de, Index Exchange, Virtual Minds, Nexida GmbH, and Mediaplus Realtime.
What: A 12-page whitepaper titled "Curation im programmatischen Ökosystem" (Curation in the programmatic ecosystem) that establishes a consensus definition of curation in programmatic advertising, maps the roles of four distinct curator types, explains the technical architecture built on OpenRTB, Open Measurement SDK, and TCF, details six use cases including green media, retail media, and contextual curation, and sets out GDPR compliance requirements including consent management and Article 26/28 responsibilities.
When: Published February 26, 2026, from Berlin.
Where: The BVDW's Working Group Data Tech & Economy, headquartered at Obentrautstraße 55, 10963 Berlin, produced the paper as a guide for the German and broader European programmatic advertising market.
Why: The industry had been operating without a shared definition of curation, creating fragmentation in how SSPs, DSPs, agencies, publishers, and data providers understood and communicated about the practice. The BVDW aimed to establish uniform market understanding, provide regulatory orientation under GDPR, and position curation as a scalable and legally sound component of programmatic advertising - particularly as AI-driven changes to user behaviour and advertising infrastructure increase the pressure to restructure how inventory is packaged and delivered.
