A+E Global Media, AMC Global Media, Fox, Hallmark Media, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Scripps Networks, TelevisaUnivision, and Warner Bros. Discovery are partnering with OpenAP to establish a standardized method to link TV ad exposure to business results, marking a significant shift towards non-traditional audience measures.
Industry-Wide Pilot Program
The collaboration will initiate a pilot phase involving select advertisers, agencies, and measurement firms to showcase the benefits of a unified approach in measuring business outcomes, like showroom visits or coupon requests via QR codes in streaming ads. Initial findings will be shared during key industry events over the next year.
Ryan Gould, Warner Bros. Discovery's president of U.S. advertising sales and OpenAP's Board Chairman, emphasized, "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."
Shifting to Business Transactions
Executives across the industry express optimism that using business transactions instead of mass impressions to evaluate ads will gain favor. During recent upfront presentations, NBCUniversal, Fox, and Amazon highlighted the value of outcome-based ad deals. The upfronts are crucial as U.S. media companies aim to sell most of their ad inventory for the upcoming programming cycle.
Standardizing Advertising Outcomes
OpenAP, founded by former 21st Century Fox, Viacom, and WarnerMedia, specializes in advanced advertising standards. The new initiative aims to establish a standardized process for linking outcome data with exposure data through a single integration point, promoting consistent use.
Future phases will introduce agentic workflow interaction support, allowing buy-side tools to leverage unified attribution signals from the CAPI, enhancing automation and optimizing video investment. This infrastructure aims to integrate with existing buy-side tools, creating a consistent framework for attribution, optimization, and performance measurement across premium video.
Overcoming Fragmentation
One significant challenge in outcome-based deals is their bespoke nature, contingent on data agreements between specific advertisers and media companies. Lisa Herdman, RPA's chief enterprise integration officer, noted that fragmentation, not strategy, is the major barrier in scaling audience-based TV buying. "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," Herdman explained. This approach modernizes TV buying, allowing for established partnerships to flourish, technology to interoperate, and clients to achieve consistent, performance-driven results.
Source: https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/nine-major-tv-companies-partnership-commercials-business-1236746146/
