For years, programmatic advertising has operated on the assumption that most buyers didn’t really want to know how the system works. That’s changing. More advertisers are asking harder questions about where their media dollars actually go, and those questions increasingly come from mid-market agencies that would historically rely on DSPs to manage the complexity of supply for them.
But now the automation that once promised efficiency is starting to look like opacity.
The mid-market’s programmatic reality
Long before “curation” became a buzzword, large agencies and holding companies shaped supply behind the scenes, working directly with publishers, SSPs and private marketplaces to exert more control over quality, pricing and performance. In some cases, they used their scale to extract rebates or capture additional margin through their supply-side relationships.
Mid-market agencies, by contrast, have typically operated inside DSP environments, buying from what was made available to them rather than curating inventory upstream. That model was easy and fast, but it came with trade-offs, including limited visibility into supply paths, little control over what inventory was included and a heavy reliance on intermediaries.
And when mid-market agencies tried to take more control, they would typically run into another problem: fragmentation. Working directly with publishers and SSPs still means endless emails, spreadsheets, deal troubleshooting and manual workflows that don’t scale. For many mid-market teams, that has made deeper supply-side control feel more aspirational than practical.
And so, for years, many simply accepted the status quo.
Why curation is suddenly everywhere
That’s why curation has gained so much traction. Over the past several years, programmatic curation has evolved from packaging data with supply to optimizing supply paths in real time, and now toward more self-service models that give buyers direct control. At the same time, SSPs have opened up more of their infrastructure through APIs, allowing third-party platforms to access, package and activate inventory in new ways.
That combination has triggered a wave of new entrants. New curation vendors are popping up constantly, each promising better performance, cleaner supply paths and more control.
For mid-market agencies, the pitch is compelling: You don’t have to accept whatever shows up in your DSP anymore; you have the power to shape it.
But there’s a catch.
Curation isn’t automatically more transparent
Curation is often framed as a solution to programmatic’s opacity problem. But in too many cases, it simply moves opacity from one layer of the ecosystem to another. Buyers are still being asked to trust what’s inside a package they can’t fully inspect. They’re told that premium inventory is being curated, that data is being applied and supply paths are optimized, but they have limited ability to verify any of it.
The incentives don’t help. In most setups, curators are paid through the supply chain, not directly by the buyer. That makes it difficult for advertisers and agencies to understand how much margin is being taken – or whether it’s being taken at all.
That’s why comparisons to ad networks keep resurfacing. The mechanics may be more advanced, but the underlying transparency issue remains.
Mid-market agencies stepping into curation for the first time risk trading one black box for another.
The questions buyers should be asking
If curation is going to deliver on its promise, buyers have to demand clarity about what they’re actually getting, and that starts with asking the right questions.
- Do we have visibility into exactly what’s being packaged, including the publishers and supply paths involved?
- Can we verify that the data layered onto inventory is actually being applied?
- Are we buying directly from publishers or through resellers?
- How much are we paying for curation, and where is that margin being taken?
- Can we adjust, optimize and control packages in real time, or are we dependent on emails and spreadsheets?
- Do we have access to reporting that shows what is actually happening in flight?
If the answers they get aren’t clear, agencies should be cautious. The point of curation is greater control and transparency, not a more polished version of the same old black box. It’s okay to trust, but you also must verify.
The bigger problem: Too many hands in the jar
But even if curation improves how agencies access supply, it won’t fix the deeper structural problem of how money flows through programmatic.
Today, the transaction path often runs from advertiser to agency to DSP to SSP to publisher. At every step, value may be added, but so is cost – and it can be remarkably difficult for buyers to determine how much of their spend actually reaches the publisher. That’s obviously an efficiency issue, but it’s also a visibility issue and, ultimately, a trust issue.
The disconnect affects publishers, too. In many cases, publishers have limited insight into why advertisers are buying their inventory, how it’s performing or how their impressions are being packaged and sold.
Advertisers struggle to understand where their budgets go, and publishers are left without a clear view of demand on the other end. Both sides lose visibility as yet more intermediaries sit in the middle.
Where programmatic has to go next
If the industry is serious about fixing programmatic, it can’t stop at optimizing around the edges; it must rethink the core mechanics.
That means shortening the distance between buyers and publishers and making the flow of money more transparent. It means giving publishers more control over how their inventory and data are packaged and sold. And it means building systems where transparency is baked into how transactions happen.
Curation can play a role in that future, but only if it evolves beyond opaque packaging into something buyers can actually see, control and trust.
A transitional moment for the mid-market
For mid-market agencies, the immediate opportunity is to take more control of supply and demand more visibility into how programmatic works.
Self-service curation platforms are now starting to make that possible by aggregating supply across multiple SSPs, reducing manual work and giving buyers clearer insight into what they’re buying. Some are also beginning to extend those capabilities into environments like YouTube, giving agencies more control in places that have traditionally offered less flexibility.
None of this solves every issue in programmatic overnight. But it does point the industry in a better direction. And for mid-market agencies that have spent years operating inside opaque systems, it shifts the balance of power, finally giving them the ability to move from passive buyers to active shapers of supply.
