• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, 2 hours ago

Remember when "programmatic" felt like a completely new business model? The concept was a simple and seductive one: using data and automation to reach the right person, at the right moment, for the right price. It would eliminate waste. It would make media buying so simple, with pure efficiency.

What we witnessed instead was a fire hose built for media buying.

The programmatic model that survived is an open exchange that prefers scale above all else. We have more impressions and lower CPMs with broader reach. The industry pitches volume the way we used to pitch rating points, where the sheer size of the number validates the quality of what is being bought. The result, although efficient, resulted in stories for media buyers to tell about their negotiation skills over a beer at Grumpy’s, rather than the best possible outcomes for their clients.

Ads continue to run next to content that no brand would willingly touch. Bot traffic consumes budgets (shh, we don’t talk about that). Made-for-advertising sites are everywhere, designed not to serve readers but to harvest programmatic dollars (you know what they are, just look on your phone).

A study from the Association of National Advertisers recently found that only 36 cents of every programmatic dollar actually reaches a publisher. The rest disappears into fees, intermediaries, and infrastructure, adding complexity without adding value.

We built a machine and let it run itself, with the outcome not watched too carefully for fear we might call ourselves ugly.

Curation is the industry's attempt to solve its own problem, and I think it’s a solution worth considering, especially in a world where the open web is still battling walled gardens.

The thing about curation that most people miss is, it’s not a new layer of technology. It is a philosophical shift. For many years, programmatic optimized for reach. Curation optimizes for relevance.

Instead of buying from a massive open pool of inventory and hoping the targeting does its job, curated deals package high-quality supply with first-party data signals, get prevetted for brand safety, are tied to transparent supply paths, and are structured so buyers know what they are getting before they spend a dollar.

It all creates fewer redundant paths and unknowns. The advertiser has more control over where the budget flows.

That shift matters enormously, because walled gardens figured this out a long time ago.

Google and Meta didn’t win because their targeting is magical. They won because they offered advertisers something the open web couldn’t: control and quality in a single, frictionless package. When you use Google or Meta, you know what you’re buying. You know where it runs. You get measurement you can defend in a meeting. The open web offered scale but little transparency.  That is a terrible trade-off when a CFO is asking you to justify your budget line by line.

Curation changes that equation. When you build a curated private marketplace that pairs your audience data with a premium, transparent supply, you’re giving the open web the quality layer it always needed. You make it possible to reach people in editorial environments that reflect well on your brand, with targeting that does not rely on third-party identifiers. 

You get a supply path you can actually audit -- not a small thing. That's the structural argument for why independent publishers, quality journalism, and the broader open internet can remain commercially viable in a world where Google and Meta otherwise just take the lion’s share of the spend.

I understand the skepticism.  In many cases, I foster it with my columns, but this time around, I see the value. Curation has a flavor that sits well with me. The underlying problem it solves is real and getting worse, not better.

The open exchange, left to its own devices, will always optimize toward cheap, and cheap and good are not the same thing. Curation is a corrective measure that can save time, improve pricing, and even keep small agencies competitive with the big ones. It is how buyers regain the intentionality that got lost when we let the machines take over without giving them any taste.

The open web deserves a win. Curation might just give it one.