Ad curation isn’t a new concept, but in 2025, advertisers are embracing it with renewed urgency.
From widespread bot traffic, heightened brand safety concerns, and the proliferation of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites to economic pressures and shifting audience signals, industry challenges are creating considerable stress for marketing teams. CMOs are under heightened pressure to defend budgets to skeptical stakeholders. 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 nearly 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, curation allows them to invest in quality, avoid waste, and connect with target audiences in key moments of impact. And for leaders, it offers 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 this framework strategically, advertisers can drive stronger outcomes, reach people in trusted environments, and prove the ROI of their media investments to key stakeholders.
In 2025, intentional media buying isn’t just a best practice—it’s 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 10% of global open programmatic ad spend—roughly $701 million—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 offers a powerful response to these many challenges. Curated deals, often powered by first-party data and contextual targeting, 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, curated deals help advertisers reach audiences in the right moments, minimize waste, and drive measurable performance.
The growing emphasis on intentional ad investment reflects a deeper recognition: In today’s media landscape, quality and performance are no longer separate considerations.
Low-cost media placements might cost less upfront, 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 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 deliver stronger value by reducing waste and supporting more focused, results-oriented investment.
As media buying becomes more complex, efficiency and precision are growing increasingly important. Curated deals 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 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 labelling themselves as “curated” without meaningful differentiation.
Perhaps equally important is taking a holistic approach. 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 growing momentum behind ad curation reflects a broader industry shift toward transparency and precision. It signals that advertisers are moving away from 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. As generative AI and advanced data signals continue to evolve, curation will grow even more sophisticated, enabling more intentional 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.
