Curation is everywhere in the programmatic conversation, but the term has become increasingly disputed. In many cases, it describes repackaged inventory with data layered on top. As brands and agencies get more curious about curation, there needs to be a better understanding of how curated deals are reshaping the path from buy-side strategy to publisher yield. Curation differs from standard open-market inventory in three key respects, according to Joseph Meehan, chief supply and exchange officer at Seedtag. It gives buyers more control over supply, brings intelligence into the mix and lets them optimise.“Open inventory gives tremendous scale and it’s easy to use, but it doesn’t have a lot of intelligence. As a curator, you can bring your own data, control supply and optimisation allows you to do something unique and create new value,” he says.The best of the bestBeing closer to supply allows buyers to pick out the inventory that they want before it hits the DSP, providing prime real estate and opportunity on the supply side.There is already filtration in the open market, with measures such as QPS throttling, geo-filtering and invalid-traffic filtering, says Joe Ligé, CEO & co-founder, Culture Hive Media Group.But curation takes things to a different level – hyper-curation or tier-two curation – which makes a difference in data, performance, quality for the advertiser and actionability.“In digital advertising, there’s a whole lot of supply, so picking a subset of the supply is critical,” he says.Deal checklistWith AI entering the curation space, the field is evolving quickly. Yet, assessing a deal comes back to familiar marketing fundamentals, says Meehan, who advises buyers to concentrate on three areas.The first thing is the source of the data being used to curate and the fidelity of that data to the objective of the campaign. The next is the distance to the inventory – whether it is first or second reseller versus direct, for example. Finally, look to relevance to the target audience.Transparency is a big part of what curation aims to solve, in terms of supply, data and how segments are performing, which increases optimisation possibilities. “If you can understand that, you can control it and you can change it in real time,” he says. Agentic buying As a publisher, Yahoo sees content curation as within its domain, says Gabriel DeWitt, head of consumer monetisation at Yahoo.While some partners, such as Seedtag, can bring forward unique technologies that drive value, in many cases, they simply commoditise the offering.Meanwhile, as a founding member of the Advertising Context Protocol, Yahoo is working with Omnicom to explore how AI can automate the insertion order process, enabling it to be handled entirely by large language model-based agents.“It’s still early on, but I think that this type of approach is going to grow quite a bit in 2027, and for some publishers, being able to go directly to agencies, holding companies and buyers is a major capability that’s going to be disruptive,” he says.Emotional connectionWhile advertising has become good at identifying who to target, the future lies in developing a better understanding of why people engage with a brand."We built a platform called NueroX Curation, powered by our proprietary AI, Liz, which looks at interest, intent and emotion as additional signals, so you are not just looking at the inventory, you are understanding what the content of the page is actually about and the emotional connection the user has. This gives you direct, pre-bid control over that intelligence," says Meehan.Yet Lige offers a word of caution: while programmatic is good at scale, it can also scale the wrong thing.“With AI, people talk about the concept of the human in the loop, but it should be the human in the lead to decide what you’re looking for, because if not, you’re going to scale very fast, but you can also scale very wrong,” he says.Demography versus cultureAccording to Lige, cultural relevance is probably the most important piece in advertising. Two individuals can be demographically identical, but their cultures and how they identify can be completely different, meaning advertiser lookalike models may not be very accurate.“Brands need emotional equity. You need to invest in that culture. Mountain Dew is synonymous with gaming. How did that happen? You inundate yourself and you create emotional equity. That’s how you become part of a culture,” he says.Get curiousFor buyers looking to curation, it’s important to realise that it comes in many different forms, so do your due diligence, advises Meehan.“You want to make sure that when you’re working with the platform that you understand what data is in it, how it’s being used and, ideally, that it understands the content itself rather than just who it is and where it is.”Yahoo’s De Witt adds that people should realise that everything in advertising is curated to some extent, so it’s important to engage with what is being curated and ask lots of questions. “You can’t just accept the word curation from some partner or company and go ‘Great. Done.’”SpeakersJoseph Meehan, chief supply and exchange officer, Seedtag Gabriel DeWitt, head of consumer monetisation, Yahoo Joe Ligé, CEO & co-founder, Culture Hive Media GroupModerator Lucy Shelley, Campaign UK, tech editor