Curation spent much of this year in a fog, loosely defined and inconsistently applied. Agencies say they plan to tighten the screws in 2026, reclaiming some control over what the term actually means — and how it’s used in practice.
That shows up in moves like Butler/Till’s, which quietly, but materially, shifted where decisions get made. Earlier iterations of curation leaned heavily on static publisher lists and pre-assembled PMPs – useful for setting baseline quality controls but rigid once live and slow to adapt as performance signals shifted.
Butler/Till is moving past this approach by pushing curation upstream, deciding what inventory should even be allowed into the auction rather than relying on DSP-side filters to clean things up downstream. That shift runs through SWYM.AI’s SelfCurate platform, which gives the agency’s traders direct, self-serve control over supply before it reaches the DSP. Instead of bundling fixed lists they can dynamically score, filter and assemble inventory from a defined set of SSPs as campaigns run – producing a smaller, more intentional bidstream not because DSPs are being asked to “do better” but because fewer, higher-quality impressions are permitted into the marketplace to begin with.
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