• by Michael Lyons , Op-Ed Contributor, April 21, 2025

In today's digital landscape, marketers face a perfect storm of pressures: fragmented consumer attention, budget constraints, and the looming deprecation of third-party cookies.

These pressures continue to squeeze every dime from each and every corner of the advertising ecosystem. Now, as our industry prepares for yet another upfront season, ad tech curation is emerging as a strategic approach that offers relief to all stakeholders in the value chain.

Here’s why — and how you can benefit.

Standing Tall In A Complex Ecosystem

At its core, curation is about control and quality — as in, who is determining what inventory is valuable and how do they guarantee results?

It’s a simple but tough question to answer as the traditional programmatic model often leaves marketers at the mercy of complex algorithms and opaque supply chains. Curation shifts this dynamic by allowing advertisers to identify and secure high-quality inventory upstream, directly from the supply side.

Think of curation as buying VIP concert tickets with backstage passes. You're paying a premium for a curated experience because the value justifies the investment. But as any savvy concert-goer knows, you don't need the VIP package for every show. The most effective ticket-buyer is one who chooses wisely.

It’s the same with advertising curation: Include it as part of a balanced approach.

Why Curation Matters So Much Right Now

Curation is quite the buzzword these days. That’s because the deprecation of third-party cookies has forced a reckoning, leaving us to wonder whether our current ad targeting is adequate for our future needs. In recent years, the industry's answer has been a resounding no. This realization is what’s accelerating interest in curation as marketers seek alternatives to cookie-based targeting.

By moving upstream in the supply chain, advertisers can now tap into sophisticated data that finds advertising inventory most relevant to their specific audiences. Rather than relying solely on third-party cookies, curation enables targeting based on contextual signals and valuable sell-side data.

The result: greater scale and more precise targeting — a powerful combination in today's challenging environment.

Creating Value Through Strategic Implementation

For curation to deliver on its potential, marketers must consider several key factors:

1. Supply Chain Integrity: Effective curation begins with direct SSP integration. Without this connection, you risk simply replicating the current DSP environment with an extra step. Validate that your curation partner has meaningful data and access to real supply.

2. Measurement Beyond CPMs: Lower CPMs don't always equal better results. Evaluate curation on its ability to drive business outcomes, not just transactional metrics. This requires integrating curation measurement into your broader marketing analytics framework to understand how it performs relative to other channels.

3. Test and Scale Strategically: Approach curation like any other test strategy. Determine a budget based on business goals, prove performance, and then scale what works. This measured approach ensures you're building on success rather than chasing the latest trend.

4. Balance is Essential: Curation should complement direct publisher relationships, not cannibalize them. An all-in approach to any single strategy limits options and creates vulnerabilities. The most effective advertisers maintain a dynamic model that secures premium inventory while remaining flexible to market opportunities.

What Curation Means for Your Advertising Budget

Curation represents a transformative evolution in programmatic advertising that balances precision and efficiency with an open, competitive marketplace. By combining audience and contextual data with supply chain integrity, curation allows buyers to address many of the industry's most pressing challenges.

Curation is never going to claim your complete advertising budget, but its strategic use will reveal hidden value. As with the original purpose of the upfronts — securing valuable ad inventory at optimal prices — curation creates a framework that adapts to today's dynamic digital landscape, all the while delivering value to all stakeholders in the advertising ecosystem.

Marketers who thrive tomorrow will be those who integrate curation into a comprehensive strategy today, thus validating performance through rigorous measurement and scaling based on real business outcomes. In a market where every dollar must work harder, curation provides a strategic edge that turns advertising investment into business impact.