Programmatic advertising was supposed to be the great equaliser—automated, efficient, and scalable. But ask most publishers today, and they’ll tell you it often feels more like a black box: too many players, too little transparency, and certainly not enough value flowing back to the people actually making the content—just 55-65% reaches the publisher depending on the stack and setup.
That’s where Multilocal comes in. Founded with the goal of simplifying the way advertisers access quality inventory, Multilocal is quietly reshaping the programmatic ecosystem. Instead of adding more layers to the stack, they focus on curating what’s already there—making premium environments easier to find, buy, and trust.
At the centre of this work is Tom Bowman, Multilocal’s Non-Executive Director. With a career spanning the BBC, startups, and global digital platforms, Tom brings a rare blend of publisher nous and commercial savvy. He’s seen how the promises of programmatic have played out in real time—and where things need to evolve.
In our Q&A, Tom shares his perspective on the future of curation, the myths around “tech tax,” and how AI might actually serve publishers (without stealing their lunch). It’s a grounded, practical view of what’s working—and what still needs fixing.
Multilocal is a curation company working with publishers and advertisers. Could you explain what curation means in this context?
Digital advertising isn’t working as well as it should. The processes and technologies originally designed to scale opportunities for media owners and advertisers are no longer delivering on their promise.
Curation is an evolution in programmatic advertising. It has been developed to streamline processes, delivering incremental value, and unlocking new revenue opportunities for both advertisers and media owners.
While curation has always existed, it has evolved. Traditionally, it was driven by the buy side through demand-side platforms (DSPs), where advertisers relied on third-party data for targeting. Now, curation has shifted to the sell side, making publisher inventory more discoverable for brands looking to reach specific audiences.
By packaging first-party data with greater accuracy, curation gives publishers more control over their inventory and improves how they monetise their data assets.
A publisher’s goal is to maximise revenue, but that’s only possible if advertisers can easily find, understand, and access their value - something that hasn’t always been the case in programmatic advertising.
How do you see the current state of programmatic advertising, and what challenges is this bringing for publishers?
Programmatic promised publishers a way to fill revenue gaps by monetising their unsold inventory. The idea was simple: make it available in the programmatic market instead of relying on house ads or missing out on opportunities altogether. But that promise wasn’t fully realised.
With an overwhelming volume of inventory, buying platforms couldn’t process it all, leading to bid throttling - where only a fraction of publisher inventory was ever surfaced, leaving valuable revenue on the table.
Private marketplace deals (PMPs) emerged as a workaround, allowing publishers to package their audiences for select buyers. But PMPs lack scale, are manual to build, and put pressure on already stretched publisher teams.
Now, curation is stepping in to rebalance programmatic, helping publishers maximise their inventory’s value while ensuring advertisers can easily discover and access premium audiences.
How does curation benefit publishers when it comes to programmatic advertising?
As mentioned earlier, curation makes publisher inventory more discoverable and enhances its value by integrating data. This data ensures ads are contextually relevant to the content they appear alongside. Combined with curation’s ability to optimise towards campaign goals, this results in stronger performance.
For publishers, curation unlocks additional revenue, while advertisers gain access to more relevant inventory and higher-performing campaigns. More importantly, when done right, curation streamlines the complex programmatic supply chain, making ad buying more efficient and reducing the operational and resource burdens of traditional approaches.
Over the past 12 months, we’ve run campaigns for multiple publishers, delivering incredible results - including a 97% uplift in incremental revenue through the adoption of curation.
It has been said that curation is just another ‘tech tax’ for publishers. How would you counter this argument?
To me, this is nonsense. A tax is something you must pay: it’s compulsory. Curation, however, is a cost of sale which publishers are not obliged to adopt.
It comes down to their preference for how they want to sell more inventory. They may choose to employ more staff to drive sales, for example. Alternatively, if they decide they're better off adopting curation to grow revenues, unlock their inventory potential, and deliver efficiencies, then curation becomes the cost of sale. But labelling it as a tech tax is just lazy – and basically incorrect.
With the tech platforms under constant scrutiny, what do you think this means for the open web? Will advertisers turn to the open web more, and how will this benefit publishers?
There’s often hesitation around the open marketplace, but if it delivers highly relevant audiences for an advertiser’s products or services, why shouldn’t they use it?
The question of whether the open web provides quality audiences is misleading - because quality is subjective. A budget-friendly package holiday and a high-end luxury resort define a valuable audience differently, yet both are valid. Instead of focusing on quality, advertisers should think in terms of appropriateness: Is my ideal audience there? Can I reach them effectively? And most importantly, is this audience real?
This is where curation makes a difference. A strong curation partner not only has the technology to match the right data with the right inventory but also deeply understands media owners, their offerings, and their value. By improving open-web monetisation and delivering measurable results, curation helps build advertiser confidence - encouraging greater investment in this powerful environment.
What innovations do you envisage for digital publishers over the next 12 months?
In this time of rapid technological change, publishers mustn’t lose sight of what matters to them. So, they must focus on their value proposition and provide their users with the content they want in the way they want to receive it.
Critical to how they operate is regularly reviewing their partnerships. As the commercial side of digital publishing evolves, publishers can’t rely on doing what they did last year. This means yesterday’s partnerships may not be the right ones for today. Publishers must ensure that what is in place continues to support their business interests.
We all recognise that AI will improve supply chains by bringing efficiencies, and publishers must be cognisant of the businesses delivering this. But it’s also important to remember that it’s not the answer to everything. There is still a wealth of areas that we can’t entrust to AI, and these require the skills and experiences of humans to be effective.
This article was originally published in What’s New in Publishing on April 9th, 2025.
