Curation
The curation trust gap: why premium supply needs proof.
Curation has become one of the biggest shifts in programmatic buying. Budget that once went to the open exchange now flows into curated deals and PMPs, sold on the promise of better quality and less waste.
Most of those promises are probably true. The problem is that nobody at the table can easily show it. So we took the 10 largest deals across two real, multi-SSP datasets and put every one through a full audit.
- Deal spend audited
- $894,009
- At risk identified
- $20,702
- Recoverable, conservative
- $12,488
- Couldn't be verified
- $502,874
The number that matters most isn't the risk
Hard-evidence money at risk came to 2.32% of spend. That's a good result for the supply. But more than half the spend, $502,874, sat where no one could confirm it either way. Almost all of it was CTV.
What good proof looks like
- It comes from someone with no stake in the result
- It uses the deal's own delivery data, not a sample
- It puts a dollar figure on every finding, counted once
- It separates what was confirmed from what couldn't be checked
Get those four right and curators, agencies and brands can all read one audit and agree on what it says. Good supply gets the credit it deserves, and the gaps get fixed.