Last week, the programmatic industry gathered in New York for the 2026 Jounce Media SPO Summit, the industry’s annual gathering of buy-side and sell-side supply chain experts.
In a standout session titled “Jounce Narrative Violations,” four industry veterans were invited to challenge the Jounce narrative and provide fresh perspective on emerging industry trends. Damon Reeve, CEO of Ozone, took the stage to discuss his view on curation.
Read Damon’s full ‘Narrative Violation’ below:
“ I was told to be punchy, so here goes…
I actually really believe in curation.
I want to say that up front, because with what I’m about to say it might not seem like it.
I’m speaking through the lens of an audience platform that works with marketers, agencies, many of you, that’s powered by, and owned by, some of the biggest and oldest publishers in the world.
Curation isn’t good for publishers. It’s good at using them.
Publishers are the OG of curation.
This is why I know curation works and know it creates value
Publishers generally, but I’ll focus on news publishers for now,
invest in journalists,
invest in holding power to account.
Invest in a style and tone that over time curates an audience of loyal and committed and like-minded readers.
Some of these publishers have been doing this for over 200 years.
Those of us of a certain vintage, will remember, every morning on their way to the office, buying from the newsstand a copy of the Post, or the Times, or WSJ.
Then, we were loyal to our paper of choice.
In that print world, publishers capture most of the value from the content they produce, through advertising, cover price and subscriptions.
A sustainable and solid business model.
Their digital equivalents haven’t been so successful.
Another form of curation I think is great.
The media planning variety.
Intelligent media selection.
Genuine audience insight,
making conscious decisions about where a brand appears and why.
That matters. That creates value
Both of these are curation of the small c variety.
Capital C Curation is different. By that I mean the latest mutation of ad-tech. The intermediary. The product. The layer that has borrowed the language of intelligent media selection to justify something quite different.
Because a lot of what is being sold as Curation right now is not intelligent media selection. It is repackaged open-market inventory with a new story attached to it.
We used to call that a white list. Same impressions. Same publishers. Same formats. Bundled differently. Except now its non-transparent, marked up, and sold to buyers who are paying a premium for quality they could have accessed directly.
That is not intelligent media selection. That’s arbitrage.
Here’s how you spot it. As a buyer, ask the curation company three questions.
- What is your take rate?
- Do you have permission to use the data and supply used in packaging your products?
- What percentage of my marketing dollars reaches the publisher?
If the response is vague, defensive, and buried in a slide about their proprietary AI methodology — that’s your answer.
Opacity is not a technical limitation in this business. It’s a commercial choice.
We’ve spent years as an industry trying to improve supply chain complexity and transparency.
And we’re now enthusiastically embracing another layer and calling it a solution.
Curation isn’t good for publishers. It’s good at using them.
From where I sit — running a publisher collective — I want to tell you what Curation looks like from the publishers’ perspective.
Publishers didn’t sign up for this.
Curation activates through existing SSP connections, using a bidstream that flows through open exchange pipes whether the publisher has consented or not.
A Curation company can package inventory,
in some instances with an audience product built substantially on publisher data,
without a contract,
without a revenue share agreement,
without a direct conversation.
But it’s the publisher’s editorial credibility, their audience quality, their brand equity — these are the things being sold.
And we see in the Jounce analysis how this benefits the publisher. It doesn’t. There’s no measurable impact on publisher yields in any way from curation.
The premium that advertisers are paying for quality environments does not reliably flow to the people who created those environments.
Curation isn’t good for publishers. It’s good at using them.
Don’t get me wrong. There are some clear benefits to Curation.
- Shifting control from DSP to SSP for marketers and reducing DSP vendor lock-in is a good thing.
- Marketers using curation platforms for sell-side data activation and custom audience matching is a good thing.
But these are buyer benefits. Not publisher benefits.
So what should the industry actually do?
Curation could be a win-win for everyone.
Put curation through the same scrutiny we’ve applied to MFA, to bid duplication, and all the other supply chain dynamics that enrich the middle at the expense of marketers and publishers.
- Be transparent
- Get rid of blatant inventory arbitrage
- Engage sellers directly and fairly remunerate them
But ultimately don’t commoditise publishers for your short term gain. They are the original curators. If publishers diminish, we all diminish.
Curation isn’t good for publishers today. But it could be.“
