• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, 3 hours ago

A few months ago, I wrote about curation as the open-web answer to walled gardens.  The primary idea was that a smarter, more governed supply chain could restore some of the transparency and quality that got lost along the way.

I still believe that to be the case, but something's happened since I wrote that column: Curation has gone from a small idea to a legitimate trend, and I hear conversations about it at every industry event I attend. The more I've listened to those conversations, the more I've realized I didn’t quite yet grasp the real value it creates.

Curation doesn't just make the supply chain more honest. It makes it shorter.

Think about what supply path optimization used to require: a trader pulling reports out of the demand-side platform, tracing which supply-side platforms were reselling whose inventory, flagging the multihop paths that were quietly taking a cut before the media dollar ever touched a publisher.

That was a lot of work, and the truth is, most agencies didn’t do it, because they couldn’t justify the ROI.  If you did choose to do it, you built entire functions around doing it well.

Curation takes that work and moves it upstream before the bid request even exists. The vetting happens at the source. The audience data, the inventory, the brand safety checks, all arrive pre-bundled into a single deal ID instead of being something a buyer must assemble piece by piece from three or four different vendors.

That's not a small operational shift. That's multiple steps in the old process simply not existing anymore.  Sounds enticing, doesn’t it?

This brings me back to how much this matters for the agencies who don't have the size to run a dedicated SPO team in the first place. Curation, done well, gives a five-person agency access to the same pre-qualified, direct supply paths that used to require an entire desk of people auditing reseller chains. That's a competitive flattening I don't think gets talked about, probably because “we removed some intermediaries” doesn't sound as exciting as whatever the platforms are pitching at NewFronts and beyond.

There's a broader pattern here too, and it connects to something I've written about agentic media buying. Everyone's fixated on the idea of AI agents taking over the mechanical parts of the buy, such as the pacing, the bidding, the optimization. Curation is the quieter, less-discussed cousin of that same story, except it happened on the supply side first, and it happened without needing an AI agent to get the credit for it.

The industry uncovered a way to automate the plumbing by restructuring where the vetting happens, rather than by handing the whole workflow to a model and some black box to figure it out.

I find this kind of small-scale optimization encouraging because it frees people up to do something else. When you're not spending your Tuesday afternoon tracing a reseller chain, you're spending it thinking about strategy, or creative, or the actual client relationship.

I understand why people were skeptical of curation as a buzzword when it first started showing up everywhere, the way most new terms in this industry get overused until they mean nothing. That said, the more people I hear talking about it, and the more specifically how they talk about it, the more it seems like this one has earned its appropriate attention.

It's not just a better philosophy for how media should move through the supply chain. It's fewer stops along the way, which saves money, improves performance, and makes things easier to manage. Sometimes the most useful trend in this business isn't the one that reinvents everything. It's the one that just quietly removes a few steps nobody needed in the first place.