Premium video advertising is being asked to do something it wasn’t originally built to do: prove performance the way digital platforms do, on a business model written decades ago. At OpenAP's Cannes Audience Summit, CNBC's Julia Boorstin moderated a fireside conversation with OpenAP CEO David Levy and Warner Bros. Discovery's Ryan Gould, President of U.S. Advertising Sales, to unpack the cross-publisher initiative announced during the 2026 Upfronts and why nine major TV publishers decided the moment called for shared infrastructure instead of competing standards.

"The economics of producing premium content are wildly broken." - Ryan Gould

Gould framed the initiative as a response to an industry running out of room. Quality journalism, live sports rights and scripted entertainment all cost more to produce than the current ad model can sustain, he argued, and the fragmentation buyers face: a different dashboard and rule set for every platform, has made a bad problem worse. "We shouldn't have seven different platforms or dashboards for premium video," he said. "We should make a single most accessible entry point."

That fragmentation, both speakers agreed, is also what's driving OpenAP's push into agentic workflows. "How can we enable agents to get access to intelligent data without having that intelligent data going back and defeating the models?" Levy asked, pointing to the tension at the center of the announcement: buyers want their agents to plan and optimize using publishers' proprietary pricing and planning data, but that data can't be allowed to flow back and train anyone else's models. The answer from OpenAP? To make that data securely accessible to agents without it ever informing decisions for other clients.

"What we need is quality signal, so we can have valuable [audience] data sitting in a data environment that those agents can [access]. How many of them saw an ad? How many of them showed purchase intent? How many of them actually bought that product?" - David Levy

Gould pushed back on the idea that unifying outcome data means chasing performance at the expense of brand impact. Upper-funnel, cultural-moment advertising still matters, but publishers can no longer treat it as separate from measurable outcomes further down the funnel. "We've just gotten way too comfortable selling the audiences that we have at a certain rate and running 30-second spots anywhere and everywhere we can," he said. "It will not work if we continue to do it within five years." 

"We have the opportunity to actually influence the industry, and we have to take full advantage of it. If we get it right, this industry will carry on for decades to come." - Ryan Gould