AOP CRUNCH: Are curated audiences the future of premium publishing?

Published: 08 Dec 2025
Author: Richard Reeves

It feels appropriate that the title for our last AOP CRUNCH of 2025 was a question. Despite curation being second only to AI in this year’s industry discourse, much of how it works, whether it works, and who benefits remains unanswered. We invited publishers, agencies, and vendors to steer us all closer to a conclusion on curation, but it is clear that the scaffolding is not quite ready to come down and reveal a consensus. Curation remains a broad approach rather than a specific technical solution, and below you will find a range of perspectives on its potential and its pitfalls.

The day’s panels were hosted by Ellie Edwards-Scott, Co-Founder of The Advisory Collective, and Jacque Chadwick, Senior Media Sales Leader.

Curate or be curated? Either way, scrutinise SSPs to unpick incremental value

Benjamin Pheloung, General Manager at Mantis, helps publishers with both brand safety and nuanced content categorisation through the deployment of AI technology. By pooling inventory across news publications in categories where brand safety is less stringent, such as culture and lifestyle, curation can unlock demand in environments that brands might typically avoid. When offloading curation responsibilities to a third-party, it’s important for publishers to communicate with SSPs to gauge the uplift provided.

“One of the biggest confusions is, what can a publisher do to interact with [curation]?” said Pheloung. “A lot of it is happening outside of their day to day. They're working with SSPs, but they're seeing a revenue line and they don't know how much of that is influenced by Mantis or another curation partner. That’s a good place to start: have a conversation with your SSP partners, understand who is looking at our inventory and who's offering that curation piece, and is that adding any value to what we're doing?”

Though curation has been a heavily pushed buzzword (no doubt adding to some of the confusion around its impact), Alex Oakden, UK and Northern Europe Director at Scope3, believes it’s familiar territory for publishers, particularly at the premium end of the industry.

“It’s an elongated process to something they’re probably already doing,” said Oakden. “Data partnerships, for example. That’s a kind of curation if it goes through an activation layer. You’re probably already doing it without even knowing it. … Publishers come to us and say, ‘I think I should be partnering on curation.’ And our answer is, ‘You’re probably big enough to be a curator yourself.’”

As for sustainability, which was otherwise conspicuously absent from the discussions, Oakden doesn’t see its reduced presence as a deprioritisation, rather evidence of its normalisation. Oakden likened sustainable advertising to Fair Trade. For his father, a fruit seller, Fair Trade went from a massive concern to something that, once standards were in place, was simply ticked off before conversations moved to more immediate and pressing matters of trade.

Buy-side buy-in for curation will take patience, trust, and transparency

For curation to be worth the effort, publishers need to see incremental revenues. To see incremental revenues, spend needs to increase. From the agency side, Rory Latham, Senior Director of Global Investment, Programmatic, at WPP Media, is yet to see this, though curation still has meaningful supply chain impacts.

“I've never had a client come to me and say, I'm going to upgrade my plan because of curation. That has not happened yet,” said Latham. “However, does that mean they're all going publisher direct for the entirety of their media plan? Absolutely not. For me, it’s a matter of, is [curation] moving money out of the open exchange and into a more controlled environment? Is it getting closer to media owners? And from that standpoint, I would say, yes, it probably is. But it’s not generating net new revenue into the industry at this point. If you're a media owner which has a massive sell through already, [curation] is probably not for you. But, if you have availability, it’s another avenue to move money out of the open exchange.”

For Ben Priest, Channel Accelerator Director, PMX at Publicis, curation is a means of increasing the availability and the ease of access to quality media, but gauging the value of media quality means rethinking standard advertising performance metrics.

“[We need] to ask, are we set up to test this properly? Whether that’s modelling things, or whether that’s regression-based attribution. Look beyond just last touch, last click, to all those quality metrics. They should come through in the long term, but our clients have to be confident enough to wait and get to that long term.”

Esme Wood, Head of Programmatic at The7Stars, believes the confidence in the quality that curation can provide will be built through trust, which has the potential not just to attract spend but strip out some of the fees currently levied to rubber stamp open web inventory.

“There is an opportunity and a shared incentive for us to rely on vetted inventory through curation, to potentially remove some of the fees that are associated with verification and therefore get more of the media spend going towards the publisher. But with that, there's a lot of trust that's needed. We’ve already talked about how risk averse clients can be. Removing that safety net of those verification partners is quite a big thing. So having trust in the quality of what is being put through these creative deals, and that it is brand suitable for specific clients, is really important. Collaborating and working closely together will help with that.”

Hand-in-hand with trust is transparency, and this, more than anything, is what Arshiya Nazir, Programmatic Strategy Director at Dentsu, believes will encourage the buy-side uptake of curation.

“Transparency is the foundation for trust,” said Arshiya Nazir, Programmatic Strategy Director at Dentsu. “While every publisher can curate audiences, the methods and standards differ significantly. One might define a ‘fashion enthusiast’ based on a few visits in 30 days, prioritising scale over precision. By creating curated marketplaces that reveal how audiences are constructed - the criteria, the depth, the granularity, we enable more meaningful conversations and informed decisions. That level of transparency is what’s driving greater confidence in curated solutions, whether through direct publisher deals or marketplace offerings.”

Can curation’s promises cut through publisher caution?

Alex Kirby, Revenue Operations Manager at Hello!, is encouraged by curation’s potential to bring publishers closer to buy-side decisioning, while also feeling cautious about what may be yet another in a long line of attempts to commoditise audiences. For Kirby, the devil is in the details, and who’s doing the curating:

“If you're talking about a [curated] agency marketplace, that's direct one to one conversation and we are really open to that, seeing it as part of our core relationship with agencies. If you're talking about an SSP integration, it’s important to us to make sure we understand exactly how the inventory and audiences are being packaged, and what the buyers are looking to achieve so that we are able to present that clearly in our offering. But as has been said this isn’t new and there are also a growing number of intermediaries who we might not have direct relationships with, possibly siphoning off revenue, value, repackaging inventory and taking away control.

“Any hesitation I might feel comes from a risk of publishers not always being a core part of that conversation and the risk of value therefore not being attributed back to publishers effectively, we really want to be part of that process and work with the curators more closely.”

To get to the bottom of whether curation is worthwhile for a premium publisher, Kirstin Randall, Digital Technology Partner Manager at Telegraph Media Group, did a deep dive into the value being provided by their various SSP partners, and how they are positioning their curated offerings to buyers.

“Curation means so many different things, there’s multiple different flavours of it,” said Randall. “We were able to look at which are the ones that we want to lean into, and which are the ones where we take more healthy scepticism. There was a lack of consistency across how each of our partners were approaching it, which made it even more complex. We needed a lot more resource than we had within our small programmatic team to understand it and optimise towards it.

“Then, when we looked at the data itself, what we were seeing from curated marketplaces versus open marketplaces versus private marketplaces and deals, there wasn't a huge difference in the CPMs for us. As a premium publisher, our CPMs are really high anyway but, in some cases, when we were looking at these marketplaces, the yields were lower.”

At the other end of the supply chain, juggling curation’s various iterations has also been an operational burden for Lina Angelides, Managing Partner and Head of Digital Planning at OMD. While she sees real opportunity in publishers being able to surface their audiences to agencies, first there has to be both a change in finding the right data for testing and the technical underpinnings of the digital advertising trade.

“Our clients might challenge us with questions like ‘What do [publishers] know about my audience that Google or Amazon or Meta don’t already know?’” said Angelides.

“It’s a challenge to prove out but we have great examples that prove the success of publisher data which is incremental to walled garden data. I really think that lies in the fact that, no matter where we are on this cookie deprecation journey, a DSP’s bidder is built to prioritise impressions it can track back to a result and so prioritises buying impressions where an identifier is available, and that identifier is still heavily 3^rd party cookie-based. Without considered intervention, we risk massively under-delivering in Safari and publisher data can help us reach audiences in cookie-limited environments”.

“So that’s my rallying cry: bring back the fact that you’ve got audiences that Google and Amazon undervalue because bidders and measurement are still so cookie-reliant.”

Supply-side ownership is the foundation of equitable curation

Clearly, both agencies and publishers are feeling somewhat bamboozled by curation, though the future of buying and selling advertising is certainly moving in a more curated direction. With so much marketing buzz behind curation, Andy Heald, Manager of Publisher Development at Index Exchange, urged publishers to thoroughly vet their partners to ensure they are getting what has been promised.

“Ask your partners how they operate,” said Heald. “Where are their fees being charged? Can you access audit logs? See exactly what's happening on a bid-based level. Ask them for the detail and the granularity. I know everyone’s pressured in terms of time but, to make sure you feel like you’re getting a fair deal, I think everyone needs to be stress tested so you can demonstrate exactly what value it is that you are adding.”

Rhys Denny, Co-Founder and CEO of @curate, expects — and hopes — that the market will evolve towards supply-side curation. Denny sees little point in work being duplicated on both ends, adding fees that erode the value gains from curation and swapping the cuts currently taken by intermediaries for new ones. Should supply-side curation gain ground, Denny believes publishers can move much closer to buyers, and the pipes to do so have already been built.

“You can start building collaborative opportunities with partners right now and take prebuilt marketplaces to buyers,” said Denny. “Buyers have come out here in these panels and said they want to get closer, they want to understand where they're buying. The opportunity is for publishers to come together to build data-enriched environments that are optimised towards an outcome, that are controlled by them and set by them. That’s what the buyers are saying they want. That's what curation should be there to do.”

Should buy-side and sell-side forge closer bonds as Denny suggests, this should translate to more spend reaching publisher pockets. However, James Walmsley, Advertising Director at Immediate Media, is concerned that inventory being bundled together with other publishers’ risks flattening commercially valuable differentiation in the market. Walmsley is excited for the prospect of getting closer to media planning, while protecting Immediate brands’ unique identities and ensuring savings are passed along fairly.

“On setup we’re often pushed with, ‘you’re currently getting your spend from third parties, therefore you should set up to the same level of cost and the same price.’ I would say, if we’re on that one-to-one level and we’re getting closer together, publishers deserve a little bit more of that share. Therefore, to make it fair and equitable, it’s about how we work closer together, make sure that we understand what the middle costs are, and how it can benefit both sides.”

When there is an efficient and auditable supply chain, participants on both ends benefit. Programmatic expert Nathan Taylor-Billings, pointed to the ISBA, AOP, and PwC programmatic supply chain transparency study, where improvements in log-level data between studies reduced unattributable spend from 15% to just 3% between phases. Taylor-Billings hopes that curation will have the same effect, while also giving agencies greater access to open web audiences at scale:

“When we look at the traditional methods of applying [curation] data to the DSP side, you’re only bidding on a fraction. Whereas when you apply that on the sell side, the publisher side, that data is a lot richer, and it enables you to have a lot more scale than applying that on the DSP side. So, I think that application is key. I want to get my audience, apply it on the sell side, which [publishers are] closer to. And that will give more relevant scale, more reach for my advertisers, hopefully more conversions, and more performance. Everyone's a winner.”

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