A+E Global Media, AMC Global Media, Fox, Hallmark Media, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Scripps Networks, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery have struck a partnership with Open AP that aims to introduce a single, standardized way to connect exposure to TV commercials with business results, the latest in a broader industry push to rely more heavily on non-traditional audience measures.
OpenAP and the media companies will launch a pilot phase that involves select advertisers, agencies and measurement firms. Early work will focus on demonstrating the benefits of a unified approach to measuring so-called business “outcomes,” which might encompass anything from visits to a car showroom to requests for coupons made via an interactive QR code that appears alongside a streaming ad. Initial results would be shared at key industry moments over the next year.
“Advertisers face growing pressure to prove performance while navigating increasing complexity. This cross-publisher initiative simplifies that challenge by making premium TV easier to connect, measure and invest in strategic audiences across data-driven video,” says Ryan Gould, president of U.S. advertising sales, go to market for Warner Bros. Discovery and Chairman of OpenAP’s Board of Directors.
In conversations taking place across the industry, executives say they hope that the idea of using actual business transactions instead of mass impressions to judge the success of a traditional ad will win over more support. Indeed, during this week’s “upfront” presentations, NBCUniversal, Fox and Amazon ahve been among the sellers spotlighting the value of using “outcomes” as a basis for ad deals. During the upfront, U.S. media companies try to sell the bulk of their ad inventory ahead of the next cycle of new programming.
Open AP is a company that specializes in setting standards for so-called “advanced advertising, and which was created by the former 21st Century Fox, Viacom and WarnerMedia.
As part of the new effort, the parties will work to establish a new standardized process that allows advertisers to connect outcome information to exposure data via a single integration point, which will support more consistent use.
OpenAP will also introduce new campaign workflows to improve performance, enabling buyers to commit new dollars across publishers and platforms. Future phases will introduce support for agentic workflow interaction and allow buy-side tools and agents to leverage the unified attribution signals from the CAPI to further automate and optimize video investment.
These capabilities will form an interoperable infrastructure that integrates with existing buy-side tools while establishing a consistent framework for attribution, optimization, and performance measurement across premium video.
One of the biggest concerns around deals based on outcomes is that they are all bespoke, and hinge on data agreed to by a specific advertiser and the media company with which they are working. “The biggest barrier to scaling audience-based buying in TV is not strategy, it is fragmentation,” says Lisa Herdman, chief enterprise integration officer at RPA, a large independent ad agency. “Building on OpenAP’s existing audience and identity infrastructure to unify data, activation and outcomes, with support for agentic workflows, gives us a shared standard without disintermediating the direct partnerships that hold the trust and execution infrastructure clients rely on. That is how we modernize TV buying, creating more room for established partnerships to build on equity earned, for technology to interoperate, and for clients to see consistent, performance-driven results across the ecosystem.”
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