The Great Curation Scam: Who’s Actually Adding Value?

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Table of Contents

• The Great Curation Scam: Who’s Actually Adding Value?

  • Curation: Who’s Innovating and Who’s Just Running …

    • Who’s Actually Doing Curation Right?

      • Audigent: The Powerhouse with Real Data Muscle

      • Multilocal’s Rebrand: The Curation Experts in a Programmatic Wild West

      • The “Curation-First” Mystery Business (In My Opinion)

    • The “Curation-First” Mystery Business (In My Opinion)

      • The Great Curation Hustle: Selling Garbage at a Premium

      • Curation in Advertising: The Art of Knowing Where the Story Begins

      • Matt Sattel on Curation: The Algorithmic Alchemy of Programmatic Advertising

      • Curation: A Smarter Path or Just Another Toll Booth on the Ad Highway?

      • The Numbers That Define the Crisis (and the Solution)

      • The Adtech Jungle and the Struggle for Survival: Who Wins in the Battle Over SPO?

Ah, curation. The latest shiny buzzword in ad tech, trotted out with the same feverish enthusiasm as a new diet fad that promises you can eat an entire cake and still lose weight. It's being sold as the magic bullet for programmatic advertising’s inefficiencies—a way to clean up the supply chain, reduce waste, and make advertising more effective.

The problem? Like every “too good to be true” solution, curation is rapidly becoming just another tool for middlemen to extract rent while doing the digital equivalent of moving peas around a plate. It’s the latest reinvention of arbitrage, where some players are truly innovating, and others are just relabeling the same old tricks with a higher markup.

If you believe the hype, curation is about transparency, efficiency, and control. If you look closer, it’s starting to look suspiciously like a rebranded paywall for inventory that advertisers already had access to. It’s a shell game where the only thing that’s changing is who gets to pocket the extra fees. So, let’s separate the actual innovators from the arbitrage artists and see who’s bringing real value to the table and who’s just taxing the system.

WTF Is Curation, Really?

Curation was supposed to be the white-glove, concierge-level upgrade that finally fixed programmatic advertising.

Think Michelin-star precision—every impression hand-selected, ethically sourced, and served on a gleaming silver platter of data intelligence. Instead, what we’ve got is more like a sketchy pop-up “tasting menu” where the chef is just microwaving last week’s leftovers and hoping you don’t notice.

In the grand utopian vision, curation is the solution to programmatic’s longest-running disaster movie:

✔ Audience Intelligence – Smarter, privacy-compliant targeting that doesn’t rely on third-party cookies like an aging influencer clinging to expired brand deals.

✔ Supply Chain Transparency – No shady resellers quietly siphoning your media budget like a corrupt accountant cooking the books. No MFA (Made-for-Advertising) sludge masquerading as premium content, hoping to pass as legitimate before you wise up.

✔ More Control for Publishers – A world where publishers actually see the money instead of watching a parade of intermediaries take their cut like a conga line of wedding crashers raiding the open bar.

In theory, this should mean better, cleaner, more effective advertising. You know, a world where your budget actually delivers value instead of evaporating like a VC-backed startup with a terrible burn rate. But here’s where it gets fun: not all curation is actually curating. Some companies are genuinely trying to build a better programmatic ecosystem—meticulously engineering smarter, more transparent supply paths. Others? They’re just slapping a “premium” sticker on the same tired inventory and marking up the price like a gas stat

Curation: Who’s Innovating and Who’s Just Running a Vegas-Style Racket?

If you’re trying to figure out who’s actually delivering value in the curation space and who’s just skimming from the top like a Vegas casino with a rigged blackjack table, here’s your definitive cheat sheet. Because, let’s be honest, not all curation is created equal.

Some players legitimately enhance advertising efficiency, providing data-driven precision that improves campaign performance. Others? They’re dressed-up arbitrage shops, adding absolutely nothing except another line item on your invoice and a smug press release about how they’re "revolutionizing" ad buying.

So, who’s actually making the programmatic ecosystem better, and who’s just shaking advertisers down for their lunch money? Let’s break it down.

1️⃣ The Real Innovators: The Ones Who Actually Do Something Useful

These are the companies that actually add intelligence to the process. Not just in the “we ran a few SQL queries and called it AI” way, but in a real, scalable, measurable way that improves campaign outcomes.

Here’s what sets them apart:

✅ They have real first-party data. Not some stitched-together, third-hand, pre-GDPR “audience graph” that’s about as fresh as a month-old bagel. Actual, privacy-compliant, valuable data that makes targeting smarter and more efficient.

✅ They use machine learning for more than just a buzzword. If a company can’t explain how their AI actually works without sounding like they copied it from a ChatGPT prompt, they’re probably faking it. The real innovators use actual predictive analytics, dynamic pricing models, and real-time audience intelligence to make ad buying smarter.

✅ They optimize the supply path. This means eliminating waste, cutting out resellers, and reducing the dreaded ad tech tax. They’re not just bundling together random websites and calling it “premium” like some glorified digital coupon book.

✅ They actually improve performance. And here’s the kicker: they have the receipts to prove it. Not just vague charts in a sales deck, but actual case studies that show higher ROI, better audience engagement, and lower costs per acquisition.

This is the difference between a real chef who sources the best ingredients and an overpriced catering service that reheats frozen chicken and calls it gourmet.

These companies? They’re actually making programmatic advertising work better.

2️⃣ The Pretenders: The Ones Who Add Fees But Not Value

And now we get to the snake oil salesmen. The ones who talk a big game about how they’re “solving programmatic inefficiencies” when all they’re really doing is adding a premium to inventory that was already available in the open market.

These are the folks who, five years ago, were hawking third-party data marketplaces that turned out to be about as reliable as a timeshare presentation in Florida. Now that cookies are crumbling and advertisers are panicking, they’ve pivoted to curation—which, for them, means relabeling the same junk inventory, slapping on a 20% fee, and hoping no one asks too many questions.

Here’s how to spot them:

❌ They don’t actually own any meaningful data. If their “first-party data” consists of scraped bidstream signals and some cookie-based segments from 2018, run.

❌ They have no real optimization technology. If all they’re doing is stuffing inventory into a DSP with a “curated” label, that’s not innovation—it’s just a repackaging fee.

❌ Their supply path is a mystery. If you have no idea how your money is flowing and where your ad is actually being served, that’s a sign they’re just skimming off the top while reselling whatever they can get their hands on.

❌ They make vague promises with zero transparency. If a company claims to be improving ad performance but can’t show real lift in engagement, conversion rates, or cost efficiency, they’re just throwing glitter on a pile of ad tech sludge and calling it gold.

These are the same players who once told brands third-party data was the future. Then when that didn’t work, they pivoted to brand safety solutions. Then contextual targeting. Now curation. See a pattern?

They’re not here to fix advertising. They’re here to keep collecting fees.