What is a curator in advertising?

Do you have to like cats?

To be a curator in advertising, it helps to have a good sense of humour and be willing to laugh at oneself. I don't mind if people hate my curating. I've never really cared about that.

You're always interested in newness. Newness can be very exciting, but at the same time very dangerous. If something's not new, you should just drop it. You wouldn't read a book and think, 'Wow, this is such a great book' if it was already being read. The same is true for what you do.

You've curated a series of ads for Adidas, why did you choose these particular spots? The first one was a big surprise. I expected the German brand to be more conservative, because it's so important for them to have a strong relationship with fashion designers. But they were so brave in their approach, and their ads have been so funny, witty, and fun. It's a real game changer. And then, later on, they came up with another, similar ad, only without the woman in the bed. This was also very bold. In the past, women in bed, when they have a man in bed, are basically seen as some sort of sex object. This goes against the whole idea of masculinity. And in addition, there's something very interesting with the ad for the men's socks. I'd never have thought that an ad for socks would turn into something so edgy and provocative. That kind of speaks to how things are changing, how people are willing to take chances and do things differently. That's how you move forward. It's interesting to see how something becomes provocative. For example, that could also apply to some people who look at the fact that I have a moustache, and think: 'Well, how dare he?' And then you get something like the beer ads. One of the things that's so great about those is that even if you think of the men wearing bikinis as sexist, that doesn't matter any more, because it's something new.

You're talking about the power of marketing. How do you explain the power of a product?

How to become a digital curator?

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The term digital curator has become ubiquitous in the modern landscape of art, culture and the Internet. In recent years, there has been an increased trend of organizations and museums embracing digital curation for their exhibits and publications.

However, if you've ever watched an interview with a museum director or curator, you might have noticed that they almost always have a strong inclination towards their works. They understand the importance of the works they curate and the audience that they communicate with and they are always eager to bring up the topic of what works (in their collection) are the most important and why they were chosen to be exhibited. The curator's passion towards their works comes naturally when talking about them in public because they are passionate towards the works themselves.

As much as curators' passion may be natural, there is still a lot that we as digital curators can learn from them about how to communicate our works. In today's post, we'll discuss how museums curators and arts organizations can benefit from their passion and learn from them. Museums curators vs. Digital curators When referring to any kind of art or cultural institution, we are generally talking about curators. Curators are art historians, who collect art pieces for exhibitions, and curate collections for museums, galleries and art spaces. In terms of institutions, galleries and museums are curators; artists are artists and galleries are art dealers. However, this is not exactly true when it comes to the terminology of digital curators.

There is no one definition of what the term digital curator means, but an emerging trend is that there are a variety of digital curators who use new and emerging technologies like social media, mobile apps, web apps and digital platforms to organize content.

What does a digital content curator do?

A lot of things; we make decisions about what to show or how, whether to share with friends or family, what's worth watching on Netflix and which videos to remove, if you will.

But in the process of curating all that content, some of that content isn't always good. It may be too violent for kids, have offensive language, depict people in an unflattering way or just not meet any standard of quality. Those pieces of content, whether they came from a creator's own work, other creators' works or third-party publishers, need to be flagged or blocked so they're not showing up in feeds or recommendations.

There are a ton of companies and organizations that are tasked with making sure that bad content doesn't find its way onto social networks. One organization you might never have heard of before is Bouncer, and we caught up with CEO Eric Stettler to discuss the company's impact and its place among the bigger companies.

"For us it comes down to user experience," says Stettler, whose company's content-curation services are used on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo! News and AOL. "We work with over 100 million active consumers every day."

Stettler says he thinks that in the past few years it has come up more often that we have too many content items versus the time to browse them. He talks a bit more about that issue with Inc.:

How about user experience? People spend a ton of time on these sites and many don't want to scroll through countless posts or look at a feed filled with uninteresting items. They say they would rather watch videos than click through more ads. One of the biggest problems, you said, is that most users are inundated by too many content items to sift through. Your team focuses on content-blocking services.

Yes, we have spent our entire industry's history in creating ever more tools and methods to help people browse and select content. While there is certainly an arms race element to what they're doing, my goal is instead to build tools to help users find what they're looking for. Right now the overwhelming thing is that there are far more content items than anyone can effectively consume.

We're focused on providing a different method, and helping folks sort through what they find.