Two different visions for programmatic media buying on the open internet appear to be taking shape.

On one side, demand-side platforms (DSPs) and the buy side are investing in empowering advertisers, for example, through measurement partnerships aimed at tying connected TV ads to sales, improving addressability with identity solutions like Unified ID 2.0 and ID5 and democratizing publisher metadata for better-informed media investments.

On the other side, many supply-side platforms (SSPs) are investing in curation, hailing it as an opportunity to use publisher data to improve ad buys. To accomplish that, they are building marketplaces of select publishers’ ad inventories for media buyers to access.