In this week’s Guest Member Blog post, Jesper Benon, CEO and Co-founder of SeenThis, explores why the open web is now positioned to deliver on its true value.
'I have been in this industry long enough to remember when "the open web doesn't perform" was treated as a settled fact. It was repeated in briefings, baked into media plans, and rarely questioned. I questioned it. Because while the data might have been accurate, it masked a deeper issue. The evidence consistently showed that the creative delivery technology was actually failing the inventory. We were judging the open web based on infrastructure that was never designed to deliver on its potential.' shares Jasper.
The numbers don't add up, yet it rarely gets questioned. 61% of online time happens on the open web1, yet the majority of programmatic budgets still flow to social platforms. That gap has persisted for years, not because the open web lacks audience value, but because it lacked the infrastructure to deliver on it reliably and at scale.
Perhaps the time has now come to change how we approach the open web. I see four emerging trends that will finally prove its true value.
What is often overlooked in this conversation is that the open web never lacked audiences or quality environments. It didn’t lack performance potential either. What it lacked was a simpler and more efficient way to execute campaigns with all of its complexity, along with technology that enables creatives to be delivered more efficiently and with greater creative impact. The social platforms succeeded - not only because of their data advantage - but because they made planning, buying, and delivery feel like a single system. The open web historically required the stitching together of many systems - DSPs, SSPs, verification tools, creative formats, ad serving and creative delivery tools - each introducing friction, and each being owned by a different vendor with different incentives. What is changing now is that this underlying ecosystem is finally starting to behave more like a unified environment. As these systems become more automated and interoperable, the operational gap between platforms and the open web begins to close. When that happens, media allocation decisions can once again be driven by outcomes rather than by convenience.
For us at SeenThis, video was the most urgent place to start. It was expensive to distribute, constrained by inventory access, and plagued by quality compromises and unreliable delivery. Brands were effectively forced to make trade-offs between reach, cost efficiency, and creative quality. SeenThis's proprietary streaming technology eliminates that trade-off, delivering video that adapts in real time to optimise both speed and quality for every single impression- at full resolution - with instant loading, working seamlessly across existing DSPs, SSPs, and agency infrastructures. The result? Brands can build creatives for impact rather than around technical constraints, high-resolution assets, richer motion, and consistent visual quality, without compromising load times or user experience.
Across our campaigns, click-through rates run at roughly 4x standard display, while brand choice more than doubles2. When delivery stops being the bottleneck, the open web competes on outcomes.
The stakes extend beyond campaign efficiency. Independent journalism, local news, niche publishers, the very environments advertisers seek to protect through brand safety, depend on advertising revenue to remain viable. When performance friction on the open web is solved, it restores what I would call the commercial oxygen that keeps that ecosystem functioning. A transparent, decentralised, and diverse media landscape is good for publishers, good for advertisers who need healthy and trusted environments, and good for consumers who benefit from a balanced internet.
The industry has long understood: sustainable advertising markets require sustainable media markets. Solving the open web's infrastructure problem is part of that equation.
I have spent years watching the gap between where audiences are and where advertising investment flows. What’s missing is not awareness. It’s the infrastructure to act on it. That infrastructure is now being built. For brands, agencies and publishers alike, the opportunity is no longer theoretical. The shift is already underway.
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