Category: In the News

Netflix and Paramount’s competing bids for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) will dominate the next act of the streaming wars.

Brands and media buyers will have to pay close attention to whichever rival proposal wins out (barring unforseen other bidders). Further consolidation in the media industry will have repercussions for advertisers and the price they pay to reach a Balkanised viewing public.

“Whichever media company, if any, ultimately secures it controls the calculus of the streaming wars and so much more,” said Mike Proulx, vp and research director at Forrester.  

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Curation spent much of this year in a fog, loosely defined and inconsistently applied. Agencies say they plan to tighten the screws in 2026, reclaiming some control over what the term actually means — and how it’s used in practice. 

That shows up in moves like Butler/Till’s, which quietly, but materially, shifted where decisions get made. Earlier iterations of curation leaned heavily on static publisher lists and pre-assembled PMPs – useful for setting baseline quality controls but rigid once live and slow to adapt as performance signals shifted.  

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.

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