Premium TV publishers are investing heavily in proprietary data and infrastructure, but the industry keeps running into the same wall: speed and standardization. At OpenAP's Cannes Audience Summit, CNBC's Julia Boorstin sat down with Cara Lewis of TelevisaUnivision, Travis Scoles of Paramount and Matt Jamison of Fox Corporation to explore how better measurement, shared standards and cross-publisher collaboration can make audience- and outcome-based buying more scalable across the industry.
Basic counting remains a hurdle to accurate audience measurement, especially for publishers like TelevisaUnivision, with Lewis noting that third-party measurement consistently undercounts the company's Hispanic audience. That gap led TelevisaUnivision to build its own U.S. Hispanic household graph — but the data only matters if partners actually use it. For Lewis, that urgency comes down to proving TV's value on a timeline advertisers now expect from digital and social.
"We know that TV works and clients know that TV works. We all know it works, but we [need to move faster] to show that." - Cara Lewis
Scoles argued the industry's real obstacle isn't a lack of solutions but the will to adopt them. Multi-touch attribution, CTV signal and alternative measurement methodologies have been discussed for years, yet inertia allows old habits to persist. But, perhaps the tide is finally turning, with transparency and collaboration opening up new doors that are giving premium television a real competitive advantage. Scoles pointed to OpenAP's centralized conversion API as a concrete step in that direction, noting it lets "premium publishers and premium video act as a data unit" for brands running performance campaigns across multiple partners.
"We have never been more transparent with our data…We want to be an open book because that's a competitive advantage compared to a walled garden." - Travis Scoles
Coming together to standardize workflows doesn’t equal less competition, though. Jamison noted "there's a difference between standardizing workflows and then looking at standardization of value." Standardizing workflows helps reduce friction, and reducing friction matters, he said. It opens up time and resources for the more important work of competing on value.
"If we can take those walls down and make ourselves feel a little bit like how social's been so easy to buy, that frictionless environment allows for more dollars to flow in." - Matt Jamison
Looking three years ahead, the panelists converged on a single word: simplicity. After years spent building out infrastructure, standards and signal, the goal each returned to was making TV as effortless to buy as the platforms it now competes with. As Lewis put it, "we need simplicity in this business. We are making everything so out there, but we're not getting to the center of what we need to make it easy for clients to see the why."