Inside Curation Conversations

Recently, we sat down with James Leaver, Founder and CEO of Multilocal. James brings decades of experience across media, technology, and partnerships, with senior leadership roles at Microsoft and MailOnline, as well as global consulting work with companies including ByteDance. As someone who has spent his career navigating the intersection of publishers, platforms, and programmatic innovation, James is uniquely positioned to help set the tone for the many Curation Conversations we will be having on this platform whether they are specifically about curation or more broadly about the technology and environmental challenges being faced by the industry more broadly. 

Thank you for talking with us. Let’s start with why you wanted to launch the Curation Conversations platform.

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For the last couple of years there has been a huge amount of noise across the industry, on every continent about curation and the role it plays (or not) in the ecosystem. Generally throughout the discussion there has always been a lot of “curation confusion” with people casting onto curation whatever suits their specific use case. It’s not dissimilar to what we are seeing now with AI and Agentic across the industry and in fact, Andrew Casali recently referred to it as “Agentic Confusion”. 

As a leading international curator, we believe it’s essential to have an industry hub that cuts through that noise—bringing together informed voices to openly discuss the opportunities, challenges, and realities of curation.

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What content are you hoping to see on Curation Conversations?

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I’d really like us to be engaging with a broad range of voices from across the ecosystem—platforms, SSPs, DSPs, data companies, publishers, agencies and sellers. The more perspectives we bring in, the more useful this platform becomes.

There are some big topics we need to spend time on. The impact of AI is an obvious one. We need to talk about AI more broadly and agentic systems specifically, and how those two things are actually playing out in practice. I also think there’s a need for greater clarity from exchanges and SSPs around what they’re trying to achieve and where they see the industry heading, particularly with developments like containers and containerisation. AdCP is another important area to unpack, especially in the context of the wider agentic debate. 

And then there’s curation itself, what it really means for publishers, how it’s changing supply-side decisioning, and the knock-on effects for agencies. I’m particularly interested in how agencies are responding, where their models may need to evolve, and how curation could enable them to pivot in meaningful ways.

Those are the kinds of conversations on things that are driving curation forward, and I’m looking forward to seeing them take shape on this platform over the next few months. 

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Can you share with us how you got into curation. Why did you start Multilocal?

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I was on the sell side at big companies in global roles for most of my career. One of the things that always frustrated me was the struggle that publishers had in monetizing their inventory internationally because they were lacking scale. Add to that the complexities of the supply side which has multiple publishers, multiple browsers, and multiple SSPs who are all managing auctions, ad formats, and data suppliers in multiple languages.  I saw an increasingly complicated landscape that needed simplification. That’s what Multilocal was founded to do. 

Initially, our focus was on simplification—making life easier for publishers so they could better monetize non-domestic inventory. As we moved deeper into curation, though, it became clear that the need was much broader: the entire supply-side landscape needed simplification.

At first, we worked with one SSP across many publishers, and it was relatively straightforward. But as we expanded to two SSPs and then three (and now over 18), real decision making was required—we had to decide which platform was best for which campaign, how to activate campaigns most effectively, and how to optimize performance.  All of this got us deeper and deeper into curation and automation.  

That’s how we evolved. There was no master plan—just constant evolution and innovation, guided by what the market needed.

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The idea of curation has taken off since you launched Multilocal. Everyone in the industry has been talking about it, but as you say, there’s a lot of confusion. What do you think people are getting wrong about curation?

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Curation offers a fairly broad range of applications, which is exciting. Even in the last 2-3 years we have seen a variety of interesting innovations and business models come to market with players from across the advertising ecosystem getting involved. But we find too often that people think of curation too narrowly, that it’s a single tactic, or a limited use case. Some teams use curation simply as a safe-list or a commercial PMP across one platform. They aren't wrong , but curation actually has quite broad applications, some of which we haven’t discovered yet. I want people to be open to exploring the full breadth of what curation can offer. 

An area we think is interesting is that done right, curation can deliver SPO as it was originally meant to be not how it has become. It’s about proper optimisation of the supply path to deliver great results for advertisers. We actually now refer to it as audience or outcome path optimization: ensuring brands reach the right audiences or achieve the right outcomes through the most relevant environments every time. 

When curation is reduced to a single dataset or a single deal, it’s easy to wonder what all the excitement is about. The real value comes from using curation to rethink how audiences, environments, and supply paths work together. And we’re still in early days.

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Multilocal recently launched its curation engine, cureon. Can you tell us about that?

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We built cureon–a curation engine– to make the supply side of programmatic a lot more manageable. Instead of treating planning, activation, and optimization as separate steps handled by different tools, cureon brings them together so decisions connect. It helps teams figure out where campaigns should run, how supply should be packaged, and how performance can be improved over time. We use automation where it helps, and human judgment where it matters. Because it’s unbiased, cureon works across SSPs, data partners, and formats without pushing anyone into a specific setup.  I think of it as being biased to delivering outcomes. 

I think of it like an electronic program guide for the open Internet. I want people to be able to buy an audience in the same way—and with the same ease—that I watch a streaming movie. If I want to watch Mad Men on TV, I don’t care whether it is on Prime Video, Netflix, HBO, or Disney. I just want my browser or smart TV to find it for me.  Similarly, I don't care where the best data is, I just want to buy that audience--cureon helps you buy the audience.   

At the end of the day, it’s less about adding another platform and more about simplifying how programmatic gets done.

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You mentioned “agentic confusion” earlier. Can you explain what you mean by that? 

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I think the main issue is that everyone is launching agents, but there are a lot of questions about what agents are meant to do, what they are doing, what they can do, what you want them to do, and whether everyone across the ecosystem really needs to have an agent. 

It reminds me of other times when new technology was taking hold. Years ago, I had a friend who was product head for a UK broadcaster’s streaming TV offering. I was chatting with him a few months after the iPad came out. He said he was putting together a concept for their iPad app. I asked him if he really thought that was worthwhile, at the time I couldn’t imagine watching television on a tablet. He said, “At some point my chairman is going to come in on a Monday morning and say, ‘I bought an iPad for the kids this weekend. Why don't we have an app?’ And I need to be able to say, "Here's my plan.”

I think that’s where we are with agentic. Everyone needs to have a plan because at some point (and probably sooner rather than later) everyone will be using one, but we also have to be comfortable with the fact that we don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with all that AI yet. 

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There is still a lot of fear that when we really do figure out how to optimize AI, it’s going to take over, and humans will not have a role to play in programmatic marketing. Do you think that’s what will happen?

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This panic that machines are going to take our jobs is also not new. When programmatic advertising started, I remember having conversations with salespeople who were convinced the machines were going to take our jobs. It’s now 20 years later and there are probably more people working in advertising sales now than ever.  

People still want human relationships, and I don’t believe that humans will ever be replaced. I believe that the jobs we do will shift significantly in the next 15 years and even in the next two years. But that’s happened before as well. Someone recently told me that the most in demand jobs of 2010 didn’t exist in 2004. That statistic might not be exactly right, but it makes sense. Roles often change as a result of new technology. I don’t think humans will be replaced, just shifted. 

Do you think it’s important that we start developing standards and an ethical framework now as AI is evolving?

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Absolutely. I think that’s where AdCP is trying to lead the industry, and it’s very important. The industry has to consolidate around standards of delivery and measurement. It’s very difficult to drive growth if every platform is different. 

As for ethics, it’s only going to be more important that we operate with integrity as AI gets better and deep fakes start looking more and more real. 

Our industry has already learned how important standards are. Think about the beginning of digital advertising when every platform had different specs for banner ads, for example. We don’t have that problem anymore because of the IAB standards which cover not just formats but metrics for measuring success. This means that everyone – buyers and sellers – can compare like with like when planning, buying, and measuring.  

 Standardization doesn’t mean a completely level playing field or a lack of competition; publishers can offer as many ads per page and charge whatever they want, and buyers can choose which publishers are worth the price. Standards just mean that we can all work together and compare options. Standards allow a level of healthy competition that drives growth, which is what we’ve seen over the last couple of decades.  

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We’re just starting a new year, and it feels appropriate to end this interview with your predictions for 2026. Where do you think curation will be when this year is over?

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I don’t think we’ll be talking about curation in the same way by the end of the year, because it will simply have become part of how programmatic advertising works. It’s been treated as a buzzword for a long time, but we’re now at a point where people are starting to see it as something they need to understand and apply properly.

That’s why clarity matters. When curation is reduced to a single tactic or dataset, it’s easy to miss the bigger picture. The real value comes from understanding how audiences, environments, and supply paths work together, and how those decisions drive outcomes.

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