Ad curation has evolved from a niche programmatic tactic to a strategic necessity for many advertisers navigating quality concerns, budget scrutiny, and supply chain opacity. As spending on curated deals climbs and transparency becomes non-negotiable, marketing leaders need to understand what's driving this shift and how to leverage curation effectively.
Key Takeaways:
Ad curation isn’t a new concept, but in 2026, advertisers are embracing it with renewed urgency.
From widespread bot traffic and heightened brand safety concerns to the proliferation of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, industry challenges are creating considerable stress for marketing teams. CMOs are under pressure to do more with less budget. Agency leaders are caught between rising operational costs and shrinking profit margins while trying to prove value to clients. Meanwhile, media buyers must deliver results in a digital ecosystem that’s seemingly growing more complex and fragmented by the day.
In this context, it’s no wonder ad curation is gaining momentum. As advertisers seek control, efficiency, and transparency, spending on curated inventory is rising fast, with programmatic advertisers expected to spend more than twice as much on private marketplaces (PMPs)—a common format for curated deals—as on the open exchange this year. By enabling advertisers to access pre-vetted inventory enriched with data signals like first-party data, strategic curation allows teams to invest in quality, avoid waste, and connect with target audiences in key moments of impact. And for leaders, it can offer a way to bring clarity to complexity: streamlining media strategies, prioritizing brand safety, and delivering performance that’s easier to measure and defend.
By understanding what’s driving the current momentum behind ad curation and applying it intentionally, advertisers can drive stronger outcomes, reach people in trusted environments, and prove the ROI of their media investments to key stakeholders.
Intentional media buying has become a strategic necessity. In a digital landscape plagued by quality concerns and growing performance pressure, advertisers are becoming far more discerning in where they invest.
Concerns around waste, brand safety, and personalization are at the forefront for most marketers. One recent report found that roughly $701 million—representing 10% of global open programmatic ad spend on websites—went to MFA sites in Q1 of 2025 alone. Bot traffic is on the rise, now accounting for 37% of all internet traffic. For the first time in a decade, automated traffic has overtaken human traffic, a trend largely driven by the explosion of low-quality, AI-generated content. At the same time, signal loss and rising privacy expectations are making it harder to reach target audiences using traditional identifiers.
Economic volatility only intensifies these pressures. As budgets tighten, scrutiny on media investments increases. Every dollar must work harder, and leaders are expected to prove ROI faster and more rigorously than before.
Curation can offer a powerful response to these many challenges. When implemented strategically, curated deals, often powered by first-party data and contextual targeting, can enable advertisers to deliver more relevant messaging in trusted environments—while also respecting user privacy. By bundling premium, brand-safe inventory with privacy-friendly data signals, well-executed curated deals can help advertisers reach audiences in the right moments, minimize waste, and drive measurable performance.
The growing emphasis on investment reflects a deeper recognition: In today’s media landscape, quality and performance are no longer separate considerations.
Low-cost media placements might require less investment, but they often underperform. Campaigns run on unvetted sites can suffer from low viewability, weak engagement, or poor conversion rates. These hidden costs—from wasted impressions to brand safety risks—can easily outweigh any initial savings.
In contrast, curated deals can allow advertisers to focus on inventory that’s prepackaged for relevance and engagement. For example, a baby and toddler brand running holiday promotions might use a curated deal built around parenting lifestyle content with high engagement from millennial parents. Or, a financial services company could activate a curated PMP featuring premium business publications, reaching high-intent readers in trusted, high-attention environments.
These kinds of curated activations allow advertisers to align messaging with contextually relevant content, avoid fraudulent or wasted impressions, and reach audiences in environments that drive stronger outcomes. In an economic environment where every dollar is under increased scrutiny, this kind of precision is critical. While curated media may not always offer the lowest upfront cost, it can often deliver stronger value by reducing waste and supporting more focused, results-oriented investment.
In addition to quality concerns, the conversation around programmatic transparency has reached a tipping point. For years, advertisers accepted opacity in the supply chain as an unavoidable cost of doing business. But in 2026, that indifference carries a price few organizations can afford.
Analysis by the ANA shows that only 36 cents of every programmatic dollar actually reaches publishers. The remaining funds are absorbed by intermediaries, platform fees, and layers of technical infrastructure that often provide little visibility or tangible value to advertisers. The scale of this inefficiency makes it difficult to ignore: In 2025, waste in programmatic spend was estimated to total about $26.8 billion globally.
Such inefficiencies directly erode campaign performance, weaken publisher sustainability, and undermine the business case for media investments. When nearly two-thirds of every dollar spent vanishes before reaching working media, leaders face an uphill battle defending budgets.
Curation can help close that gap. By providing tighter, verifiable supply paths, curated deals can give advertisers clearer visibility into where ads appear and how budgets are deployed. While curation does add another layer to the supply chain, it can also streamline the path between advertiser and publisher by consolidating spend with trusted partners and delivering greater transparency. And when used in conjunction with open inventory, curation can enhance programmatic scale, allowing advertisers to balance broad reach with verified quality and maintain flexibility across different campaign objectives.
The urgency around transparency reflects a practical challenge: Proving ROI is incredibly difficult when most of the budget disappears into the nebulous unknown. Without verified, contextually aligned impressions served to real people, performance metrics themselves become unreliable. Advertisers who treat transparency as a strategic function (rather than an afterthought) gain a measurable advantage: 41% of marketers see curated deals as a path to higher ROI, driven by reduced waste and stronger performance in trusted environments.
As media buying becomes more complex, efficiency and precision are growing increasingly important. For advertisers facing quality and transparency challenges, curated deals can support both goals—not by replacing DSPs, but by working in tandem with them.
By filtering inventory based on performance criteria, brand safety, and contextual relevance, curation simplifies the early stages of the media buying process. By the time this inventory enters a DSP, it is already optimized for different campaign goals, allowing buyers to focus on optimizing bids and managing campaign performance in real time.
This can help improve operations across the board. When incorporating curation within a holistic media strategy, teams spend less time fixing inventory issues and more time refining strategy. And when curated inventory is available within a unified platform that also includes search, social, and open marketplace programmatic, the benefits are even greater. Rather than managing multiple point solutions and reconciling data across different dashboards, teams gain a more streamlined workflow, cross-channel optimization, and unified reporting.
Together, these capabilities help advertisers to reduce waste, improve outcomes, and respond more confidently to performance expectations. And for CMOs and agency leaders, they provide better visibility into campaign performance, which is key for building compelling business cases for media investments.
To get the most from curated media, advertisers need to take a thoughtful approach. Teams should look for partners and integrations that are clear about how inventory is curated—including the data used, the filtering logic applied, and the deal structures or fee arrangements behind it. Transparency is essential, especially as more solutions in the market begin labeling themselves as “curated” without meaningful differentiation. As curation gains momentum, advertisers should be wary of vendors repackaging standard programmatic inventory under the “curated” label without implementing rigorous quality controls or supply path optimization. This risks teams paying premium prices for deals that don’t deliver measurably better performance or transparency than open exchange alternatives.
Additionally, given that curation adds another layer to the supply chain, advertisers should evaluate whether the performance lift justifies both the additional cost and complexity. Structured testing that measures incremental value against these trade-offs can help determine when curation delivers meaningful returns.
Taking a holistic approach is also critical. Curated media shouldn’t operate in isolation. The most effective strategies embed curation into broader omnichannel campaigns—and ideally within platforms that support unified workflows across multiple channels. This ensures that curated media supports larger business goals and works alongside other channels and strategies.
Finally, performance measurement is key. Advertisers should track how curated media performs compared to non-curated environments, with attention to both engagement and cost efficiency. Premium pricing may be justified if the results are there, but it takes intentional measurement to know when and why that’s true.
The momentum behind ad curation reflects a fundamental shift in how advertisers approach programmatic investment. It signals that advertisers are moving away from purely volume-driven tactics and instead prioritizing inventory that delivers measurable impact while maintaining brand safety standards.
For agency and brand leaders, this shift presents both an opportunity and a strategic imperative. The open exchange remains an important source of reach, but in 2026, it’s increasingly paired with curated strategies that bring added control. Together, they enable advertisers to pursue growth without compromising accountability.
As generative AI and advanced data signals continue to evolve, curation will grow even more sophisticated, enabling more precise contextual targeting while maintaining privacy standards. Those who integrate curated approaches in a thoughtful way now—combining them with data-driven strategies and cross-channel optimization—will be better positioned to demonstrate clear ROI, defend investments to key stakeholders, and gain a competitive advantage in the increasingly complex digital media landscape.
__
Want deeper insights into the trends shaping advertising this year? Our 2026 Trends Report: Rewinding to Fast Forward explores the forces shaping media quality, transparency, and performance—including how to turn the industry’s quality quandary into a strategic advantage.
