We team with Curated Media to look at how curation can help advertisers find the balance between the need for campaign scale against the costly risk of ad wastage…

CTV is no longer an experimental bucket for surplus broadcast budgets; it is now a heavyweight in the media mix. In the US alone, CTV ad spend is projected to edge towards the USD$38bn (£28.5bn) mark this year, and ExchangeWire research showed 25% of companies growing their CTV spend in 2025.

But with great scale comes familiar, persistent questions around fragmentation. As the ecosystem splinters across premium SVOD tiers, rapidly expanding FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) channels, and OEM-owned interfaces, the distance between the media buyer and the viewer has widened. For advertisers, this fragmented landscape presents a fundamental conundrum. How do you balance the need for campaign scale against the costly risk of ad wastage?​

The scale vs wastage tightrope

Historically, the programmatic promise was simple: plug into a demand-side platform (DSP), set your parameters, and let the algorithm find your audience wherever they are travelling across the web. However, applying this open-web logic directly to TV has proven problematic.

In the pursuit of scale, buyers often find themselves spraying ads across myriad disjointed CTV apps and channels. This methodology might tick the box for reach, but it leaks budget at an alarming rate.

When you buy blind across a fragmented network, you are inviting inefficiency. The tension here is palpable. Buyers want the scale that programmatic pipes provide, but they are increasingly weary of the opaque, shuffling nature of the transaction. If programmatic CTV without intervention feels chaotic, it’s because it fundamentally is. 

Enter: Curation. Curation is no longer just an industry buzzword; it’s an important strategy for media buyers looking to drive smarter targeting on CTV.

Rather than waiting for inventory to hit the DSP and attempting to filter out the noise post-bid, curation allows buyers to shape the supply before it  reaches the bidding environment.

Taking the 'hop' out of the chain

Wastage isn't exclusively a targeting issue; it is also a structural one. The programmatic supply chain is notoriously convoluted, and every intermediary 'hop' takes a margin, stripping working media from the advertiser's budget and eating into publisher yield.

For media agencies and direct advertisers, transparency isn’t merely a nice-to-have feature - by now it should be table stakes. When brands operate through a curated, self-service model, they bypass the unnecessary noise. As Curated Media aptly puts it: stop feeding buy-side margins, and start eating them. By cutting out the redundant hops, every pound spent works harder.

Harnessing YouTube

In this environment, context matters just as much as deterministic audience data. By dictating exactly what environments your ads will appear in, you ensure that the creative works in harmony with the content, dramatically increasing the likelihood of conversion and brand recall.​

It is impossible to discuss this landscape without addressing YouTube. YouTube offers unparalleled scale, but it also presents the ultimate test for ad wastage. The platform’s vast, user-generated catalogue means that an uncurated buy can easily see premium ad budgets siphoned into low-quality, irrelevant, or brand-unsafe rabbit holes. Here, the tension between reach and relevance is at its most extreme. 

This is precisely where a curated approach shifts the dynamic. Rather than relying on broad-brush algorithms, savvy buyers leverage curation to extract high-quality, broadcast-level channels from YouTube’s endless stream. By proactively building and targeting bespoke packages, advertisers can harness YouTube's footprint without sacrificing context or surrendering to the chaos of the open algorithm.

YouTube advertising curation requires a shift from defensive blocking to proactive building. Of the four types of YouTube campaign, three only allow for exclusion targeting. So agencies need a tool allowing them to remove waste such as made for kids or background music channels.

Gregor Chalmers, head of broadcast, The Kite Factory, tells us: "Ultimately one of the reasons for TV being such a successful channel over the last seven decades has been the curation of high-quality, engaging content across a range of channels. In the streaming age the battle to curate not only the best content but that which is exclusive will be key. What CTV suppliers have is a huge amount of data on the viewing habits of their users: what that should mean is the ability to curate better and better recommendations and 'for you' lists. That will increase the time spent with these platforms which in turn increases their attractiveness to agencies and brands."

By utilising advanced curation platforms to construct custom, dynamic inclusion lists, advertisers can isolate specific creator cohorts that rival traditional TV networks in both viewership and production value. This means packaging YouTube supply based on granular, channel-level metadata, ensuring ads run against verified, high-attention content rather than getting lost in the algorithmic churn of short-form clips or low-effort auto-plays.

Ultimately, curating YouTube is about extracting the premium, broadcast-quality core from the centre of the world’s largest video platform, allowing brands to treat top-tier creators with the same strategic reverence as prime-time SVOD.

Shaping the future of CTV

As we look ahead, the mandate for advertisers is clear. The CTV landscape will likely remain fragmented, and the sheer volume of available content will continue to grow. But the tools to navigate this complexity have evolved.

We can no longer afford to treat programmatic CTV as a black box where budgets go in and impressions mysteriously come out.

In a fragmented CTV market, curation can be an effective way to bring more structure, transparency, and relevance to buying, but it also comes with trade-offs. Over-curate, and buyers risk shrinking reach too far, pushing up CPMs, or excluding useful inventory simply because it sits outside a tightly defined brief. There is also the danger of mistaking packaging for quality: a curated deal is only as good as the data, supply relationships, and optimisation discipline sitting behind it. 

For agencies and brands, the real challenge is not whether to curate, but how to do it intelligently. Brands and agencies that win in this next era of digital video will be those who refuse to let the market dictate their supply. They will understand that in a fragmented world, you cannot just wait for premium inventory to appear. You must cut out the noise, decide what matters, and shape the supply to your exact needs.

To find out more about how you can take control of your programmatic supply, generate instant PMP deals, and eliminate ad wastage, visit Curated Media

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