Inside’s Stagwell’s AI media curation marketplace

**Kamika McCoy** (0:10)
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone who is just absolutely dying to know what curation looks like when AI agents are handling the ad buys. I'm Kamika McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digiday.

**Tim Peterson** (0:24)
I'm Tim Peterson, Executive Editor of Video and Audio, Digiday Media.
Kamika, I was thinking about it. I think this is the first episode we've done on curation, which surprised me because curation has been such a big buzzword, and especially like 2024 was a huge buzzword. And so the fact that it took us this long to do a curation episode, yeah, I just, I wasn't expecting that. Were you or were you like, God, if we could have gone a little bit longer, maybe?

**Kamika McCoy** (0:59)
Well, I will say one, late is better than never.
So glad we did address it. But two, I guess it's apt, right? Because when you talk about curation, this ties into this whole conversation of the supply chain, who owns it, who gets to do what. And we've had conversations flicking at this. We talked about it with Ronan Shields and Seb Joseph, and who gets to own the supply chain and how they show up. Curation is part of that. So I guess while late, still very apt.

**Tim Peterson** (1:29)
Yeah.
Long time coming, but pretty timely, especially because so for this week's episode, we had Matt Adams, who is the global CEO of Stagwell Media Platform. And Stagwell just launched its curation platform, Stagwell Curate. And so we wanted to have Matt on to talk about, okay, one, what is curation? Because if that feels like a bit of a Rortrac test where everyone just kind of has different answers for it. But then also, why does an agency holding company like Stagwell need to launch its own curation platform? A lot of the curation platforms that have come out have been from ad tech companies.
And then, like you're saying, how does this fit into what's becoming a bit of a tug of war or a power shift? In a way of who owns access to inventory. Historically, it's been the ad tech firms, and that's largely been the supply side platforms. But now you have demand side platforms like Trade Desk with Open Path getting direct access to inventory. And now you have an agency holding company. As much as they're working with, Stagwell is working with Magnite on Stagwell Curate. Matt also mentions they're going increasingly directly to publishers to source this inventory. So I thought it made for a really interesting question for Matt in terms of what's the trajectory here. And he actually he didn't deflect that question either, which was nice.

**Kamika McCoy** (2:58)
No, it's very interesting because nobody wants to step on one another's toes, yet stepping on one another's toes. So I was really grateful to have Matt break that down and also give a future forward-looking look, that's a mouthful, and how this all shakes out.

**Tim Peterson** (3:16)
Yeah, it felt like a really candid conversation. We always appreciate candor here on The Digiday Podcast.

**Kamika McCoy** (3:22)
Absolutely. Shout out to Matt. So with no further ado.

**Tim Peterson** (3:31)
Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

**Matt Adams** (3:34)
Thank you for having me. Absolute pleasure.

**Tim Peterson** (3:36)
Happy to have you because we get to talk about, well, a whole collection of topics that all kind of wrap up into this prism, if you will, with something that you all at Stagwell recently launched, which is Stagwell Curate. I think it was 2024 at our December Digit Programmatic Marketing Summit, where kind of the running joke was that curation was the buzzword of the year, which I think was surprising because there were so many other buzzwords that could have been, but that was the one that kept coming up in conversation, and there were a number of launches of curation platforms, and everyone was just kind of talking about curation.
And the thing that I struggled with, and I remember talking to, this was brands and agency execs at this event, was I've been covering programmatic advertising since 2011, and I was having a hard time understanding what curation was. Is this a new thing? Is it a new name for an existing thing? And talking with folks, some people were just like, oh yeah, I think it's like white labeled, private marketplaces. Other people were like, I'm actually not sure I'm here to find out. Other people were like, eh, it's kind of bullshit. You all now have your curation offering with Stagwell Curate. Before we get into the specifics of Stagwell Curate, what is curation?