A Beginner’s Guide to Programmatic Curation | Criteo

A Beginner’s Guide to Programmatic Curation

Updated on November 17, 2025

Table of contents

1. What is curation?
2. Agencies
3. Data providers
4. Publishers
5. Take your first steps into the world of curation

Programmatic advertising is changing. As influence shifts from the buy side to the sell side, a maturing supply chain highlights the need for better solutions across the ecosystem.

The programmatic supply chain has become so complex in recent years that it’s become difficult for players to truly thrive or to create a differentiated offering. Moreover, the dynamic changes created by the impending cookie deprecation have resulted in additional challenges for identity resolution, targeting, and attribution.

Enter, curation.

With curation, all corners of the programmatic ecosystem—media buyers, publishers, and data owners—can interact in a new way to implement supply strategies, activate proprietary data assets, and achieve better outcomes, all without disrupting existing workflows.

Here’s how curation works for each of the three key players in the programmatic ecosystem: agencies, data providers, and publishers.

What is curation?

Programmatic curation is the process of developing a personalized data and supply portfolio, then packaging these assets together to create unique PMP-based deals which can then be sold and activated on the buy side through any DSP.

Because curation relies on existing programmatic workflows, it’s a quick and simple way for both the sell and buy side to transact. In fact, curated deals can be created and activated in a matter of minutes using the same programmatic channels which already power thousands of digital campaigns on the open web every day.

In this way, curation brings buyers and sellers back together, all while protecting data assets and unlocking competitive differentiation in a crowded marketplace.

Agencies

As programmatic evolves, so too does the role that agencies play in the industry.

Historically, agencies were chosen by brands based on their media buying savvy, their ability to optimize at scale, and their connections with specific publishers. As programmatic has matured, many of these points of differentiation have become homogenized through automated platforms and a disintermediated supply chain.

In short, agencies are facing a significant challenge in differentiating their offering from other agencies in the space, and they’re losing the benefits of the 1:1 media owner relationships—such as preferential rates. In turn, they’re unable to define a competitive advantage versus their peers.

So, can curation help here? You bet.

By becoming curators, agencies can:

• Centralize their programmatic campaigns. The supply chain has become spread across multiple paths to specific supply or audience segments. With curation, agencies can specifically choose where to funnel their buying power on behalf of their advertisers. This also means they more easily track investment management from one end to the other.
• Enjoy more transparency (and less black box). Brands and advertisers have been concerned that their media dollars are disappearing into an ecosystem where everybody’s taking a cut. Curation solves this nicely, because agencies can pick the specific paths to specific publishers and layer in specific audience data.
• Restore their competitive edge. Curation re-opens the door to the 1:1 relationships that media buyers used to have with media owners. With curated deals, agencies can once again start to build preferential relationships through volume, aligned brand values, and more.

Data providers

The position of data providers in the programmatic ecosystem has always been a little precarious, because they’ve often been at the mercy of other players.

Being a middleman of sorts doesn’t mean data providers have an easy ride. In fact, it’s often the opposite that’s the case.

The core historic challenges faced by data owners in the programmatic space are as follows:

• Lack of reporting visibility. Today, data providers have little visibility into exactly how and when their data is used.
• Difficulty reaching media buyers. Data segments are often tucked away in drop-down boxes within a DSP’s user interface.
• A lack of data safeguarding. While there is a level of obfuscation of audience segments, it’s not impossible to infer the content of specific segments.

Luckily, curation can come to the rescue in this case once again.

Data providers who become curators can now package up their data with media on the supply side in the form of PMP deals, meaning they retain complete control over every segment in their roster.

Publishers

While curation has a part to play for every corner of the industry, for publishers, it allows them to create additional revenue streams via the extension of their audiences off-network, without having to relinquish control of their data to the buy-side.

1. First-party data can be protected. By layering publisher first-party data into curated deals, the publisher never needs to give direct access to their audience data to any other party.
2. Curation-based audience extension allows publishers to specifically target third-party supply that best aligns with their brand values.

Take your first steps into the world of curation

Curation is still in the early stages of development, which spells one thing for would-be curators: opportunity.

Whether you’re an agency or brand media buyer looking to defragment your programmatic supply chain, a data owner on the hunt for a privacy-safe activation strategy, or a publisher with valuable first-party data, curation might be the future of your programmatic success.

To learn more about curation, Criteo Commerce Grid team today and we’ll help you get started.

Drive success with supply solutions. Discover why 17,000+ global clients trust Criteo as their preferred advertising partner.