SODP Dispatch - 18 September 2025

A Publisher’s Engagement Playbook!

🚀 We’ve launched the first industry research report in partnership with Glide Publishing Platform!

Join global publishing leaders, product owners, data strategists, and tech innovators to benchmark how your team personalizes, engages, and grows using first-party data.

🔍️ What’s in it for you?

• Benchmark CDP Engagement, Adoption & Performance

• Discover Emerging Personalization Trends

• Access Actionable Best Practices

• Learn From Real-World Challenges & Wins

Whether you're using behavioural signals, AI-powered tools, or topic-based tagging, your insights matter. Help shape a report that reflects what’s really driving results across the industry.

👉️ Take the survey now! We need 300 respondents, and the survey closes soon. Be the first to receive exclusive insights.

Curation and The Great Programmatic Reset

By Julie Selman

Curation has become one of the biggest talking points among adtech professionals and digital marketers in 2025.

In digital advertising, curation refers to the selection and packaging of specific, high-quality ad inventory, making it easier for advertisers to buy media that’s brand safe, targeted, and effective. Essentially, this means that a partner, such as a media company or a sell-side platform (SSP) , carefully selects premium ad spaces and audiences that fit an advertiser’s specific criteria and bundles them into curated deals that can be bought programmatically.

Programmatic advertising, or the automated buying and selling of digital ad space, has revolutionised the digital advertising industry over the past two decades. However, a shift is now taking place among marketers, from a scale-at-all-costs approach to intentional, intelligent trading – especially in high-value channels like video and CTV. Curation is redefining what ‘good’ looks like in programmatic.

The benefits of curation Traditional programmatic buying on the open marketplace can present its own challenges around efficiency and clarity. Curated deals, on the other hand, streamline the supply path, cut duplication and embed first-party data, giving buyers the precision and control they need while letting publishers surface high-value impressions.

Brands can tap into curated deals built around specific audience segments, inventory types, or campaign objectives. These tailored environments improve targeting and offer higher confidence in media quality.

For publishers, curation means more predictable demand and better yield. Rather than commoditising inventory, curation allows sellers to package and present their content in ways that align with buyers’ evolving needs – whether that’s contextual relevance, premium placements, or bespoke audience overlays.

🍽️ SODP Dinner series

Following our recent dinner events in New York and London, we are pleased to announce the upcoming editions of our Audience & Revenue Innovation Series, with events scheduled to take place in California. This exclusive dinner series will bring together senior media publishing leaders and executives to explore the rewritten global and local playbooks for audience monetization and growth. Seats are limited, register now for the event.  Register for California dinner ▸ 

🧭Elements of Audience Engagement

Elements of Audience Engagement is a mindset, an introduction, and a toolkit. It is grounded in the belief that in a digital information ecosystem, prioritising audiences, their needs and habits, is journalism’s most resilient foundation for growth and impact, enabling newsrooms not just to survive but to adapt with purpose. See more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

🤖 Mastering programmatic SEO: automation vs. AI

The biggest risk of programmatic SEO isn’t scaling too little; it’s scaling the wrong way.

Automation and AI have reshaped how we research, create, and publish at scale. Programmatic SEO sits at the intersection of both. But here’s the key point: there’s a massive difference between automating research workflows and auto-generating copy.

Programmatic SEO is about identifying structured sets of search needs and building pages that serve them. That requires:

• Understanding search intent

• Grouping keywords logically

• Mapping topics to avoid duplication

• Validating which combinations deserve their own page

When research is automated, teams save time on data prep and free up bandwidth for real decision-making. When copy is auto-stitched from templates or sentence fragments, the result is shallow, repetitive, and low-trust.

Automated research workflows strengthen programmatic SEO by:

1. Clustering keywords with precision

2. Spotting missed opportunities (long-tail queries)

3. Validating intent before publishing at scale

4. Tracking search shifts over time

The goal is to ensure every page is built on intent-confirmed demand, not filler text.

Using AI to mass-generate sentence-level copy creates risks:

• Context gaps → nuance is lost

• Repetition → low engagement, high bounce rates

• Thinness → flagged by readers and search engines alike

Great programmatic SEO isn’t just about copy. It combines:

1. Solid research as the multiplier

2. Technical foundations (schema, linking, speed)

3. Human oversight for tone, authority, and compliance

AI still has its place, which involves supporting structured data, scaling FAQs, or assisting with drafts, but it should help, not replace research.

If you’re looking to scale, focus first on automating research. That’s where the long-term traffic, trust signals, and sustainable growth come from.

YouTube to implement dynamic ad insertion for brand deals | Joshua Cohen

YouTube just announced at its Made On event it’s “re-imagining sponsorships” in long-form video. It’s going to implement dynamic ad insertion for brand deals. I think it will have an immediate and profound effect on influencer marketing. Until now, if a creator recorded a brand segment, it was burned into the video. Forever. A sponsorship was a one-time deal, negotiated upfront that lived permanently in the file.(Yes, creators can trim out sponsored segments after the deal expires. Many do because they believe it increases engagement. But there was no possibility to monetize that piece of content with sponsorships in the future.) Read more ▸

Australia vs ‘the algorithm’, ad revenue vs compliance: What next for teen social media ban as regulator rules out government IDs as platform age-check backstop? | Mi3

Australia has put social platforms on notice: fail to keep under-16s out and the bill could hit $49.5 million. But the quick fix is off the table with the eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant reminding platforms they are barred from using mandatory government ID checks, forcing platforms to find privacy-preserving workarounds that prove effective, fast, and audit-ready. On the upside for the platforms, they are not required to age verify all their end-users to meet their ‘reasonable steps’ obligations. Read more ▸

ChatGPT developing age-verification system to identify under-18 users after teen death | The Guardian

OpenAI will restrict how ChatGPT responds to a user it suspects is under 18, unless that user passes the company’s age estimation technology or provides ID, after legal action from the family of a 16-year-old who killed himself in April after months of conversations with the chatbot. OpenAI was prioritising “safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens”, chief executive Sam Altman said in a blog post on Tuesday, stating “minors need significant protection”. Read more ▸

Catch up with the creators and publishers you care about on Discover | Google

It’s often hard to keep up with all the articles, videos and social posts, especially across many different sources and platforms. That’s why we’re bringing this info together in one convenient spot. In the coming weeks, you’ll start to see more types of content in Discover from publishers and creators across the web, such as posts from X and Instagram and YouTube Shorts, with more platforms to come. In our research, people told us they enjoyed seeing a mix of content in Discover, including videos and social posts, in addition to articles. Read more ▸

Meta created its own super PAC to politically kneecap its AI rivals | The Verge

In late August, two pro-AI super PACs were announced on the same day, intent on shaping the upcoming midterm elections. One was a fairly traditional super PAC, announced via a splashy press release, with multiple major industry players planning to donate over $100 million to boost AI-friendly candidates across the country. The other was far more unusual. Meta had quietly filed to create the Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California, a state-only super PAC that would allow Meta to spend its own money to run political ads on behalf of their AI interests — and only their interests. Read more ▸

Why local SEO is thriving in the AI-first search era | Search Engine Land

Generative AI is changing how users search. With instant answers from AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other tools, many searchers no longer need to click through to websites – especially for informational queries. But this change has resulted in many websites seeing declining click-through rates despite rising impressions. However, there’s a notable exception: local search. Businesses that depend on local intent are seeing steady performance, with no signs of the “alligator graph” (rising impressions and falling clicks) that plagues other categories. Read more ▸