Why Curated Marketplaces Are Key to Effective Programmatic Advertising

Introduction: Streamlined Supply for Healthcare Marketing

Scaling across premium inventory shouldn’t require a long list of separate publisher deals. However, many marketers still depend on traditional publisher negotiations, leading to both prolonged setups and fragmented data.

At PulsePoint, we are recognized as the leading healthcare marketing platform because we help brands get more from every impression—whether by reducing audience waste with our proprietary AI bidding solution, Adaptive Optimization™, or by improving outcomes through higher-quality supply. Curated Markets focuses on the latter, providing marketers with the intelligence and control they have come to expect on the audience side.

Built directly into the PulsePoint platform, Curated Markets lets marketers browse, select, and activate multiple premium, privacy-safe publishers with a single click—combining reach, relevance, and speed. This more thoughtful and streamlined approach reflects a broader trend in programmatic healthcare advertising, where curating private marketplaces is becoming the standard for accessing premium, controlled inventory at scale.

‍

The Importance of Private Marketplaces

According to the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2024 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark Study, 41% of ad spend was in the open marketplace and 59% in private marketplaces (PMPs) last year. This is a complete reversal from 2023, when 59% of spend went to open exchange and 41% to PMPs. Why the flip?

In more detail, PMPs offer several key potential benefits over open exchange when purchasing inventory, including prioritized access, quality and relevancy, and increased control over where ads are served.

Because nothing in life or in digital advertising is perfect, there are a few disadvantages to buying media through private marketplaces. 

For starters, PMPs can be a complex strategy to manage, requiring a lot of time and effort. PMPs don’t run themselves. Advertisers need deep knowledge of supply opportunities, strong publisher and supply-side platform relationships, and the ability to negotiate with multiple sell-side partners at once.

Then there’s the factor of targeting multiple deals per campaign or tactic and troubleshooting with sell-side partners when setup goes wrong. If a brand lacks the internal expertise or external partnerships to broker these deals or manage their activation, they won’t be able to extract the total value of PMPs.

PMPs have also historically been static, meaning that little to no data is applied to the inventory to enrich the media buy and make it more relevant to the target audience. 

This isn’t to say there isn’t still incredible value in PMPs. But there’s more value in curated PMPs.

‍

The Rise of Curation

Over two-thirds of the $150 billion open exchange programmatic advertising market is now funneling into curated PMPs. Even Google has publicly backed curation as a core strategy. But what exactly is it?

Curation integrates enriched data and quality supply into a single package, often activated as a PMP deal. This approach of injecting data into the supply path enables performance-ready buys that reduce waste, increase relevance, and give marketers greater control over outcomes. A few curation use cases stand out:

• Audience segments: Curation integrates more first-party data, such as behavioral, contextual, and transactional, into curated PMPs so that brands can better target their specific audiences with the right messaging and offers.
• Campaign performance data: Through real-time supply and data optimization, curated deals ensure brands hit buy-side campaign KPIs, pacing, and spending goals.
• Contextual signals: Ad inventory is often enriched with data or contextual signals to create higher-quality, more targeted advertising opportunities.‍
• AI-driven curation: AI can improve curation’s ability to optimize against core KPIs and predict performance.

Curation delivers many of the same benefits as PMPs, like the potential for exclusive access to high-quality supply, but with the added benefit of access across publishers and supply sources. Curation also adds the ability to apply enhanced data to the sell side and optimize through the supply path, leading to stronger performance.

Here again, like PMPs, curation requires some effort to extract the most benefit. If an advertiser negotiates a curated deal, it still must work with the party doing the curation, either at the supply-side platform (SSP) level or via a curation partner who works with multiple SSPs. You still need a partner who is well versed in this mode of media buying and has extensive relationships across the supply side. You also need the time, expertise, and resources that curation requires.

That’s why PulsePoint has tapped into the value of curated PMPs with its own curated marketplace solution: to help give turnkey access to pre-negotiated supply across publishers geared toward health marketing goals.

‍

‍PulsePoint Curated Markets

Traditional curated markets typically offer access to premium inventory, sometimes layered with first-party data. With PulsePoint, curated markets go further. Backed by deep expertise in health campaigns, we build direct integrations with supply partners and publishers, creating a bidirectional data highway where live performance signals continuously refine inventory for quality and relevance. These exclusive, health-focused partnerships—unavailable to other demand-side platforms—are sourced, negotiated, and maintained directly between our platform and publishers. The result is what we call Responsive Supply™: premium access that not only simplifies activation but also actively drives better outcomes.

Pharma brands can run on existing Curated Markets supply accessible in our platform today, or custom-curate supply from multiple publishers to achieve specific campaign objectives. 

The following Curated Markets are available for immediate activation within the categories below: 

• Performance Markets: Supply that is specifically optimized to achieve desired campaign KPIs (engagement, viewability, VCR)
• Content Markets: Content-specific and contextual supply packaged to streamline inventory access and activation, especially for highly fragmented supply or contextual definitions that require a higher level of vetting (sports, women-owned, minority-owned, Hispanic content, LGBTQ content, Spanish language) and popular channels (CTV/OTT, audio, 45/60/90-second video, native display)
• Endemic Markets: Readily available supply across premium endemic publishers.
  
  • HCP Endemic Markets: Turnkey access to premium endemic publisher inventory whose audiences skew toward physicians and ability to target by NPI, including Electronic Health Records (EHR) and email newsletters (eNL).
  • DTC Endemic Markets: Turnkey access to premium endemic publisher inventory whose audiences skew toward consumers.
• Custom Markets: Custom, brand-curated supply inclusive of multiple publishers.

Once a Curated Market is activated within a campaign, we review performance data daily and optimize automatically to ensure curation achieves healthcare provider (HCP) or direct-to-consumer (DTC) campaign KPIs, pacing, and spending goals. Optimizing results by curating the inventory we receive from the supply side delivers superior outcomes compared to optimizing only one side of the equation.

‍

Conclusion

‍

Curation is transforming programmatic advertising by simplifying access to quality inventory and data, but PulsePoint’s Curated Markets are built specifically for health marketers—and go further. Unlike traditional PMPs that add complexity and limit scale, our Curated Markets connect exclusive, health-focused supply directly with validated clinical and audience data. Through direct integrations with publishers and supply partners, live performance signals continuously refine inventory for quality and relevance—creating Responsive Supply™ that adapts in real time to deliver stronger outcomes.

That’s why PulsePoint’s Curated Markets aren’t just easier to activate; they’re designed to give health brands a smarter, more seamless supply path across the entire health journey.

Learn more about PulsePoint’s Curated Markets solution by contacting us today.

‍