Agencies push curation upstream, reclaiming control of the programmatic bidstream

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.

Call it dynamic curation. And it’s being used for all the agency’s programmatic buys in the open web, not just a particular part of it. Increasingly, those deals are being re-assembled continuously. As Scott Ensign ,chief strategy officer at Butler/Till, explained: “Something like 80% of our spend is through deals, and more and more of those are curated dynamically.”

Moreover, because that curation is happening at the supply level, the agency is inherently choosing how inventory flows into the auction – favoring direct, authorized paths and suppressing redundant or resold routes to the same impression. That, in turn, limits MFA exposure and unnecessary intermediaries without sacrificing reach. 

“Instead of working with partners on a managed service basis, we wanted our teams to be on platforms doing their own curation of inventory,” said Ensign. “That gives us more precision and control of what we’re doing, as well as in a more agile way we can do things a lot faster and in a more customized way for specific clients with specific campaigns.”

As this dynamic plays out, agencies end up with more leverage. For years, the decision-making about which impressions get bought has lived deep inside the DSP – a tangled box of algorithms that advertisers and agencies are largely asked to trust rather than inspect. Butler/Till, and others like it, is trying to invert that. 

“We engage and negotiate our own optimal supply path,” said Paola Pobiete, media lead at agency Gale at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in New Orleans last week. “We run mostly on PMPs, try as best we can to run on clean supply and we layer and filter our own data on top of every campaign to just make sure that it’s going to the right place, and again, mitigate that waste.”

That’s curation in everything but name – and notably, it’s described as agency-authored logic layered onto supply, not something delegated to a DSP or an SSP’s pre-packaged bundle.”

What emerged repeatedly at the summit is that this isn’t an isolated rethink but a broader recalibration. Across agencies, curation is being repositioned as a control layer – ma way to decide what inventory is eligible for consideration before DSPs apply their own optimization logic. 

Which is why holdcos like Dentsu are plugging directly into CTV SSP Magnite’s ad server so they can curate supply directly. Through the ad server, the agencies are able to curate inventory one-to-one with each publisher, then layer their own planning tools, first-party data and AI models on top before passing those curated deals back to the media buyers.

“This is certainly a large play that’s happening today,” said Mike Laband, group svp of revenue at Magnite. “It’s not for everyone, though, because the juice needs to be worth the squeeze. You have to be a large enough partner and command the opportunity from it.”

In other words, curation at this scale vs. say with SWYM.Ai is only really achievable at the biggest agencies. Every curated path adds QPS load, requires DSP sign off, and increases operational complexity. As a result, curation is becoming more selective and centralized whole broad reselling and loose intermediary layers are being pushed out.

Taken together, together, these moves point to a subtle but meaningful shift. Curation is moving away from intermediary-driven packaging and toward agency-controlled, supply-rooted marketplaces.

Agencies want direct access, transparent signals and stricter provenance so they’re embedding themselves at the supply level and defining curated paths themselves. That pressure is forcing SSPs to clamp down on reselling, enforce stricter transparency rules and treat curation as an extension of supply-path optimization, not a monetization tactic. 

For years, the ecosystem has been asking about supply-path optimization fees and more,” said Ravi Patel, CEO of SWYM.AI. “This is basically the supply chain management we’ve been looking for.”