Curation continues to be at the top of all the headlines. As a leader in curation, we're highlighting what we find to be the most informed discussions on the topic, and a recent Digiday article with Coca-Cola dives into the specifics. In it, James Trott, Senior Director of Global Addressable Media at Coca-Cola, sheds some light on Coca-Cola's use of curation in a programmatic strategy that invests in spaces outside of large walled gardens like Google, YouTube, and Amazon.

“It’s about working out how you curate all the media you need while mitigating the risk of quality loss by ensuring that your minimum standards for programmatic media are respected,” Trott stated. He later emphasized that testing curation can restore marketers’ confidence in programmatic buying.

Using curation to mitigate risk isn't a new concept, but Coca-Cola sees it as much more than just that. “If you think about what the optimal media supply would look like for [programmatic marketers] in Spain versus Mexico versus Australia, there’s going to be differences. It’s almost like the personalization of media for any market,” said Trott.

Senior Editor at Digiday Seb Joseph expands on this strategy, explaining, “He’s referring to using curation to build bespoke marketplaces — mini-marketplaces shaped by Coca-Cola’s own localized view of what quality inventory is. These are underpinned by the data available to their marketers and the specific outcomes they’re trying to achieve for their brands.”