By Fern Potter, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Multilocal
The industry spent much of this past year talking about curation – we tested it, debated it, and introduced new “curation products” at a dizzying pace. But as we head into 2026, the dust has settled and one truth is emerging: curation is no longer an experiment, it’s the connective tissue of modern media buying.
What comes next is bigger than a new tactic; it’s a shift in how we plan, activate, optimize, and collaborate across the open web.
To unlock curation’s full power, however, the industry will need to rethink long-held beliefs and shake some bad habits. We need to move from identifiers to real audiences, pair human judgement with agentic speed, and simplify workflows rather than piling more tech onto already overburdened teams.
Here are three shifts that will define 2026:
Addressability → Audiences: Re-humanizing the open web
Programmatic was built on the promise of perfect addressability. But our dependence on identifiers – cookies, IDs, proxies – has flattened the nuance of human behavior into a handful of binary signals. Brands spend months developing rich audience understanding only for the system to compress it into something almost unrecognizable.
Curation changes that. It blends signals – context, quality, environment, demographics, performance, and privacy-safe identity – to meet audiences where they are naturally most receptive. With curatable formats like CTV, DOOH, and audio gaining momentum, advertisers can now reach audiences programmatically in their real lives whether that’s at home, online, or on the move.
In 2026, expect a decisive shift from asking, “Can we find an ID?” to asking, “Are we reaching the right audience in the right environment?” with the latter becoming the true measure of success. The result will be media that feels aligned to strategy. This is where the open web regains its competitive edge.
Analogue → Agentic: Automation grows up (but doesn’t replace us)
Agentic advertising – autonomous AI systems that plan, activate, and optimize – is no longer a theoretical slide at a conference. It’s here. With launches like AdCP (Scope 3), UCP / Deals API (IAB Tech Lab), and a wave of agentic-native companies coming online, automation is accelerating faster than the industry’s operational models can keep up.
The promise is enormous. We will see frictionless activation, faster commercialization, and rapid test-and-learn without operational drag. But there’s a catch: agentic systems without human oversight don’t scale curated audiences, they distort them.
Curation needs context, judgement, and an understanding of nuance including brand safety, cultural cues, emerging behaviors, and competitive realities. These are not things an agentic model can simply infer.
In 2026, the biggest gains won’t come from choosing between human or agentic systems. They will come from pairing them. Interoperability—not ideology—is where growth will happen.
Additive → Agnostic: Simpler stacks, not bigger ones
Programmatic has historically solved every problem by adding another layer: more platforms, more intermediaries, more tools. The result has been complexity, opacity, and rising costs.
Curation flips the model. Instead of building more tech, it builds more clarity by unifying planning and activation, connecting audience insight directly to supply, and letting advertisers activate first-party data across high-quality environments with full transparency.
Agnostic curation is the next evolution. It works across every channel, DSP, publisher, and data partners, adapting to what advertisers already use rather than forcing them into yet another platform. Agnostic curation rewards ownership of audiences rather than ownership of tools.
In 2026, we’ll see more buyers look to agnostic curation to help them do more with the stack they already have.
The shifts we need in 2026 are clear. Prioritizing audiences over identifiers, blending human expertise with agent-driven automation, and eliminating additive complexity in favor of agnostic, flexible systems. If we do this, 2026 becomes the year curation finally delivers on its full promise and is able to offer performance, transparency, and control in a way the old programmatic model never could.
About the Author
Fern Potter, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Multilocal, is helping to lead the company’s mission to transform programmatic advertising through curation
