Curing the Curation Conundrum

Over the last few years, curation has become one of adtech’s favourite buzzwords. It’s taken over LinkedIn feeds, dominated conference panels, and suddenly every Tom, Dick and Karen in the industry seems to be selling it.

Like many industry terms before it, curation has been elevated to near-mythical status. We’ve crowned it with grand titles, placing it alongside phrases like “context is king” or “data is queen.” Could curation be awarded Prince status? On second thought, perhaps not. Given recent royal headlines, the last thing the industry needs is another Prince awkwardly trying to avoid the cameras in the back of a car.

But here’s the reality: curation isn’t king, queen, or even the Pope. It’s simply common sense.

At its most basic level, curation is about intentionality. It means selecting inventory deliberately rather than letting it be determined by a sprawling web of intermediaries. It’s about applying logic to how supply paths are structured, ensuring ads land in environments that make sense for both the advertiser and the publisher. And it’s about efficiency: removing unnecessary hops in the supply chain, reducing duplication, and creating more transparent buying paths.

In other words, curation isn’t a format or a targeting add-on. It isn’t a special type of campaign or a premium feature that sits on top of existing buying strategies. It’s simply a way of choosing how media is bought.

So why has it suddenly become such a hot topic?

The answer is fairly straightforward. Over time, programmatic supply chains became bloated, opaque, and - if we’re being honest - rather messy. Layers of intermediaries multiplied, inventory appeared across multiple resold paths, and buyers increasingly lost sight of where their budgets were actually going.

The industry needed a term to describe cleaning up the pipes. But instead of calling a PowerPoint presentation “Let’s Fix the Plumbing,” we came up with something far more exciting: Curation.

By naming and packaging the concept, we inadvertently turned something practical into something ceremonial. Curation started to feel like a premium product or a feature you had to activate. And with that shift came one of the biggest misconceptions in the market today.

Somewhere along the way, buyers began saying: “We’d love to use curation… But we don’t have a curation campaign.”

Here’s the thing: You don’t need a curation brief.

Curation doesn’t require a separate IO, a new budget allocation, or a specialist campaign type. There’s no magical brief that suddenly unlocks the ability to structure supply more intelligently. Curation isn’t something you switch on occasionally; it’s a decision about how your supply paths are constructed in the first place.

Waiting for a “curation brief” makes about as much sense as waiting for a no-KPI campaign booking to land in your inbox. You’ll likely be waiting a while, and in the meantime budgets will continue flowing through the same tangled supply chains that prompted the conversation in the first place.

The real question buyers should be asking isn’t whether they are running a curation campaign. It’s whether their supply structure is logical and efficient.

If you’re buying programmatic media, you can curate it. Simples.

Brand campaigns can be curated. Performance campaigns can be curated. Retail media extensions, seasonal bursts, and always-on activity can all benefit from the same principle. Curation isn’t a line item in a media plan; it’s a strategy for how media should be bought in the first place.

None of this is revolutionary. In fact, that’s the point. Curation isn’t a shiny new tactic; it’s simply better infrastructure. And beneath the hype, curation is really just basic hygiene for a complex ecosystem.

That means structuring supply properly from the start, packaging buying logic clearly so buyers know exactly what they are purchasing, and creating transparent commercial models that remove surprises from the supply chain. The aim isn’t to introduce another layer of complexity but to eliminate it before it ever reaches a DSP.

Because ultimately, curation doesn’t need a tiara or a coronation moment. It doesn’t need to be treated as a special occasion.

It just needs to become standard practice.

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