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Why transparency, AI, and supply quality are converging for buyers and sellers
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How to own your future on the premium open internet
Inside The Trade Desk’s OpenHouse, three forces — measurement, AI, and premium media — converged into one idea: the marketing operating system that connects brand and performance.
For five days in June, while the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity hummed along the Boulevard de la Croisette in France, The Trade Desk planted a flag at Cabana Row. OpenHouse served as a home for media industry partnership, open daily, built less for a stage and more for a conversation.
Senior leaders across brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms talked honestly about where marketing is headed. The throughline was clear: As discovery gets faster and the industry gets noisier, the brands that win are the ones treating measurement, AI, and premium media not as separate bets, but as one connected system.
Measurement that unlocks growth, not just reports the past
A conversation between Jeff Green, founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, and Tracy-Ann Lim, chief media officer at JPMorganChase, set the tone. The unscripted exchange centered on the modern marketing advantage and the importance of one single word and its ability to reflect real business outcomes. As Green said, “The word ‘measurement’ is used 100 times more often at this Cannes than it was 10 years ago.”
That’s not a coincidence. It’s the industry orienting around the challenges that unlock a healthier ecosystem. But measurement only matters if it’s pointed at the right things — a sharp point made by Lim. “Too often, we optimize to the things we can measure and not the things that matter.”
And the shift is already in action. At a roundtable on rethinking measurement “beyond last click,” the same theme surfaced. Marketers are moving from post-campaign reporting toward in-flight intelligence. And incrementality is becoming a planning tool, not a scorecard.
At OpenHouse, Mastercard senior fellow Raja Rajamannar put the stakes plainly: Proving marketing’s value to the C‑suite has become urgent. CMOs, as he noted, are expected to connect marketing investments to business impact in a way they can credibly see.
“The holy grail for marketing is measurement and metrics. CFOs and CEOs understand only one thing about marketing — its performance, as measured by these metrics — and that’s what we really need to crack.”
What this looks like in practice
A full-funnel framework ties every touchpoint — awareness to acquisition — back to real business KPIs, so marketers can move from assumptions to certainty. The Trade Desk’s measurement tools can help advertisers:
Connect awareness, consideration, and conversion to business outcomes, not proxy metrics
Use incrementality to decide where the next dollar should go
Bring creative and media together to help you understand not just where an ad ran, but why it worked
The best marketers, Lim acknowledged, are trading the old trappings of success for “a shared responsibility around outcomes.” That’s the version of measurement worth building toward.
Human-first AI that unifies brand and performance
If “measurement” was the most used word at Cannes, “AI” was the most debated. The OpenHouse take was distinct: Automation should sharpen human judgment, not replace it.
Will Doherty, senior vice president of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk, made the counterintuitive case that AI is making trusted publishers more valuable, not less. “AI has made information retrieval extraordinarily cheap. But when [consumers] need something more — editorial, a point of view, expertise — they seek out brands they trust.”
The big picture
Research from The Trade Desk Intelligence and PA Consulting backs the instinct. As AI search absorbs low-intent, functional traffic, the remaining journey on the open internet concentrates around high-intent moments.
95% of consumers double-check AI-generated results — usually on the open internet1
AI search occupies roughly 5% of the average digital media day1
Consumers are 1.6x more likely to finalize a purchase on the open internet than through AI tools1
The platforms defining the AI era are betting on trust, which is where the premium open internet really shines.
That balance — automation handling the task, people owning the judgment — spanned many OpenHouse conversations. WPP Media’s global chief media solutions officer, Nicola Lewis, described it as a force multiplier between AI and what she calls HI: human intelligence. Her team maps work along an “empathy gradient,” sending low-empathy tasks like data processing to AI so media buyers can spend their time on the high-empathy work of planning, strategy, judgment, and creative direction.
She notes that “AI and HI — human intelligence — being a force multiplier. You get the strength when you combine the two.”
Dating app Hinge CMO Tamika Young drew the same line from the creative side: AI can create efficiencies, but it can’t create the work that matters. “AI really cannot automate or create creativity. You still need the humanity behind the work — that’s the driving force for the industry,” she said. Doherty’s framing was about letting automation handle the task but keep the moments that matter human. “Let AI do the task of completing the purchase or comparing prices. But why we choose a brand? It’s not just the lowest price.” He advises that “we’re getting more signal, more data, and we’re able to align that. And no surprise, where there is a high brand equity in a premium ad environment, the advertising works more successfully.”
This is what human-first AI can deliver — AI that plans, activates, and optimizes across the funnel while pairing automation with transparency and control. On The Trade Desk platform, that means surfacing which campaign levers move performance, translating signals into in-flight decisions, and keeping the traders’ hands on the wheel. As Lim put it, “We’re in the decision-enablement business. Can I understand the next best decision faster than you — and then act on it?”
Premium media that earns attention
The third force ties the first two together. In a world of AI-generated sameness and infinite supply, where an ad runs is becoming the clearest signal of brand quality. As Doherty put it, “advertisers have never had more supply — but we’ve had a finite amount of quality supply.”
BCG’s managing director and partner, Leora Kelman, framed it from the consumer’s side: In a day flooded with thousands of messages, quality is how a brand cuts through. “Consumers are seeing thousands of messages a day. How do you break through the sea of sameness? That’s where premium environments — ones authentic to your brand’s storytelling — become all the more important.”
Why it matters: According to The Trade Desk Intelligence, premium environments deliver 2:
40% lift in purchase intent — 30% more effective than less premium media
30% lift in positive brand associations, and 50% more effectiveness at building them
85% of consumers say premium environments increase their trust of advertisers
With The Trade Desk’s Sellers and Publishers 500+ the highest-quality inventory available outperforms the rest of the open internet with 60% better brand awareness and a 70% lift in purchase intent.2
The case for high-quality news
In a festival conversation moderated by journalist Kara Swisher, Green and General Motors Global Chief Media Officer Shenan Reed made the case that news is the quality channel marketers keep leaving on the table. Reed was blunt about her mandate: “I move metal at the end of the day.”
Her point: The factually accurate, less-polarizing news that’s safest for brands is also what performs best — and most advertisers are underestimating consumers by avoiding it. Green added that because so many marketers retreated from news, “it’s effectively on sale, and it performs precisely because the quality and the trust travel together.”
What this delivers: Just like with any great content that keeps audiences engaged, a cleaner and more transparent supply chain can help increase working media and direct spending toward high-attention, trusted inventory — so every impression works harder.
Report
Harnessing the impact of premium: A multipronged study reveals the hallmarks of premium media.
The bottom line: One operating system, not three bets
Step back, and the three themes are synergistic. Our platform is the operating system that helps connect brand and performance — through human-first AI, premium media, and objective measurement — so every decision you make, can help drive long-term growth.
For the agencies and brands, that connection is the partnership. We provide the open, interoperable technology layer complete with identity, activation, AI, and measurement in one platform. As for media buying teams, they remain the architects of strategy and client growth, while our platform turns multiple tools into a connected operation.
It’s the kind of connection OpenHouse guests kept returning to. As GenAI audio company Bunny Creative Managing Director Paula Grunfeld put it, owning your future means we’re moving toward “creative, DSPs, ad tech, data, and measurement [leaders], speaking the same language.”
Green illuminated where The Trade Desk and the broader industry is pointed: “I’m optimistic about the entire system. … We are focusing on solving the problems that will really unlock a more healthy and vibrant ecosystem.”
OpenHouse is where those ideas start as conversations. The work is turning them into pipeline, proof, and growth.
Ready to own your future? Reach out to your representative or contact us to learn how The Trade Desk brings measurement, human-first AI, and premium media together for your brand.
This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.
Sources:
1. The Trade Desk Intelligence and PA Consulting, Brand Building in the AI Era, U.S. and the U.K., January-March 2026.
2. The Value of Premium, PA Consulting and The Trade Desk Intelligence, U.S., U.K., France, June 2025.
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