“We need to save the open web,” and other hot takes from the IAB ALM
Illustration by Nick DeSantis / Getty / Shutterstock / The Current
The advertising conference crowd reconvened this week — hot on the heels of CES — at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) in Palm Desert, California.
The dominance of Big Tech players like Google and Meta emerged as a theme, prompting a call to arms from the head of the IAB, no less, to save the open web. The conference focused on the growing potential of the connected TV (CTV) space, driven by its more advanced ad tech capabilities.
Celebrity appearances from Edward Norton and Ron Howard gave the event some star power, but ad tech was the real draw. Across panels and discussions, marketers grappled with solving challenges like measurement and fragmentation in a fast-changing environment.
With advertising now projected to be a trillion-dollar industry, much of the commentary was on the importance of steering ad budgets to the right channels. Here are the standout quotes from five marketing leaders across the industry.
David Cohen, CEO, IAB
“We need to save the open web. If everything becomes a walled garden, we will make polarization worse. We will starve our industry of oxygen and light, and an industry with nothing but walls risks becoming a mausoleum.
“If we want innovation, we need the open web. If we let it wither, it will mean the end of the industry that we have worked so hard to build for the past three decades.”
Jeff Green, founder and CEO, The Trade Desk
“I do think you can expect Google to exit the open internet at some point, simply because strategically, it’s good for them. It’s where all their privacy and antitrust risks come from, but it’s not where all the money comes from.
“2025 will be the most significant year that we’ve had yet in audio. And it’s really coming for two big reasons. One is that Spotify will fully embrace the open internet this year. And then second, the ability to get audio ads, including using Generative AI, on platforms like ours and to get them loaded will be easier than we’ve seen in other platforms where it takes a while to get started.”
Cara Lewis, chief investment and activation officer, Dentsu Media U.S.
“Audio on top of streaming is a little bit of magic. And we’re really looking at things that way in terms of how we can get that next incremental-reach point from linear to connected TV to audio and so on.”
Edward Norton, chairman and co-founder, EDO
“Television is going to be ad-supported streaming delivery. It’s now. In a few years, anyone who is still betting on the future of linear television, I pity you. It’s not only going to be effectively the largest ad-supported television network suite in history, but it’s going to be combined with the identity data that we’ve come to expect from Facebook and Google and everything. The granularity of the targeting. It’s going to be an incredibly exciting, rich new era for everybody on both sides of the equation, because we’re going to be able to bring finance-grade insights and digital-world targeting to the most powerful medium of delivery.”
Jay Askinasi, SVP and head of global media revenue and growth, Roku
“Reach, especially for mass-market products, is always going to be important because there’s some level of sales that’s driven that doesn’t come with a direct action that brands still need to take advantage of. That said, the fact that we can now measure very specific things with our broadest-reach medium in television is super powerful. And one that we’ll now see balanced.”
The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.