RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CA – As connected TV continues to pull viewers and ad dollars online, the advertising ecosystem is entering what may be its most dynamic, and complicated, phase yet, said Stacey Bohrer, senior vice president of buyer development for the Americas at OpenX.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat LA, Bohrer described today’s media landscape as “ridiculously busy,” evolving rapidly and becoming more data-driven than ever before. Post-pandemic shifts in viewing behavior have accelerated investment in digital video, pushing CTV well beyond its experimental stage.
“We’re seeing the decline of traditional upfronts, and we’re seeing buyers fully embrace programmatic,” Bohrer said. “That’s giving us access to more data points and helping advertisers drive better outcomes than ever.”
Growth brings complexity
That acceleration, she said, is also the primary source of complexity. New formats, inconsistent definitions and fragmented data sources have made it harder for advertisers to develop a unified understanding of performance.
“Everyone has a slightly different definition of the same things,” Bohrer said. “Advertisers are stitching together data from multiple channels and systems to get a view of the world. And that’s not easy.”
Nowhere is that challenge more pronounced than in measurement, particularly in CTV. According to Bohrer, advertisers are struggling to reconcile varying signals and definitions of quality across platforms.
“There’s no single, shared understanding of what ‘quality’ even means,” she said. “Unifying those definitions and making sense of disparate signals is exceptionally challenging.”
Standards exist, but adoption is the issue
While some in the industry have called for new CTV measurement standards, Bohrer doesn’t see that as the solution. Instead, she said the ecosystem needs greater adoption, enforcement and accountability around standards that already exist.
“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “What we need is follow-through. Where money flows, behavior follows.”
She also emphasized the importance of continued investment in journalism and the open internet, where outcomes can be measured transparently.
Bridging the buyer-seller divide
Bohrer also pointed to a longstanding friction point between advertisers and publishers: a lack of visibility on both sides of the transaction.
Having spent much of her career on the buy side, Bohrer said she understands advertisers’ desire to assess the true value of each impression, from frequency and timing to content signals like genre and ratings. But after joining OpenX, she gained a new appreciation for publishers’ challenges.
“Publishers often have a blindfold on,” she said. “They can’t see into the transaction in the same way buyers can, which makes it hard for them to properly value what they’re selling.”
The path forward, Bohrer said, lies in fostering more transparent, collaborative conversations between buyers and sellers, creating what she described as a more “symmetrical value exchange.”
“As that dialogue improves,” she added, “everyone wins.”
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