How curation can help fulfill the original promise of programmatic buying

Curation was one of the buzzwords at Advertising Week this year and the focus of a number of sessions that were packed shoulder to shoulder. The energy around the topic is an encouraging sign that marketers and brands see opportunity here. But while the interest was undeniable, the conversations themselves often felt surface-level and didn’t dig deep on how curation works best.

If you ask any five people who attended those sessions what “curation” actually means and how it can drive results, you’d likely get five different answers. That confusion says a lot about where we are as an industry.

In practice, curation provides opportunities for publishers, data providers and advertisers to come together in a private marketplace (PMP). The PMP is then built to address the concerns and challenges each party faces.

Programmatic buying promised to make advertising more efficient by automating transactions and helping marketers seamlessly connect with audiences. But as we layered in new technology on top of new technology, we created silos that added more friction to the buying process. Today, marketers face limited visibility into inventory; complex connections between demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) that each operate differently; and private marketplace deals that don’t scale, forcing buyers to manage dozens of one-to-one relationships.

Each of these pain points slows marketers down, wastes money and obscures results. By moving curation to the supply side, we can fix the inefficiencies that have crept into programmatic buying and increase speed to spend, but only if done correctly.

There are a lot of new curation tools on the market and in development — some of them are great now and some of them will be great down the line. But many of them don’t remove any of the frictions in our ecosystem. If anything, they add yet another layer of complexity.

Here are four principles that marketers must look for to ensure curation is done intentionally with the goal of removing friction.

Openness: Consolidation without constriction

The open web is a diverse and creative marketplace, but its potential is trapped in silos, suffocated by walled gardens and lost in translation between tech

stacks. Openness means consolidation without constriction. It’s about creating shared taxonomies — common languages for data, inventory and measurement — so that buyers and sellers can operate seamlessly across systems. The goal isn’t fewer partners; it’s more connected partners. When every platform speaks the same language, we remove friction without losing choice.

Efficiency: Addictive tech, not additional workflows

Too often “innovation” in ad tech means one more platform, one more integration, one more hoop to jump through, which leaves marketers managing more complexity, not less. If every new platform adds another login, dashboard or data set to reconcile, the result will be more process rather than more progress. A well-built curation layer should consolidate planning, targeting and activation into a single transparent workflow allowing buyers to act faster and spend smarter. Not every marketer or publisher is operating at the same level of technical maturity, and that’s OK. Some teams are ready for full automation. Others are still running on spreadsheets. Frictionless systems don’t force everyone into a single model, and they don’t favor the big enterprise businesses that have automated tech in place. To remove friction, curation engines must adapt to the user’s reality.

Empowerment: Tech built for your reality

Even the most sophisticated technology can’t replace the people who make it meaningful. As we increase our reliance on AI and move toward agentic transactions, we need to remember that the goal should not be to take humans out of the equation altogether. Machines are never going to understand brands or authenticity, and they’re never going to understand the dynamics of how your team works. In a frictionless system, technology manages the processes so that humans have more time to create value and drive efficiencies.

New technology is important, but to really remove friction we have to build our ecosystem around openness, efficiency, empowerment and humanity. The promise of programmatic wasn’t just automation — it was clarity, connection and speed. Curation is our second chance to get that right; let’s try not to overcomplicate it this time.

James Leaver is the cofounder and CEO of Multilocal, leading the company’s mission to transform programmatic advertising through curation. He has over two decades of leadership in global digital media, including senior roles at Microsoft and MailOnline

Originally published in Campaign US
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