Industry Perspectives | Why Interoperability Will Define the Future of Open Web Advertising

The open web has long struggled to match the seamless performance of walled gardens, largely due to fragmentation across technologies, datasets, and business models. As consolidation accelerates and AI reshapes how advertising systems function, interoperability is becoming central to how the open web evolves.

We spoke with Thomas Bernal, SVP, Offer Strategy & Execution at Ogury, about why interoperability remains a challenge, why achieving it is vital for the open web’s future, and the role AI can play in connecting the ecosystem.

Interoperability is often touted as the solution to fragmentation. Why is it such a critical issue for the open web?

Walled gardens skirt the need for interoperability because their supply is in such high demand that they can own and operate trading pipes end-to-end. The open web, by contrast, will never have a single player with that dominance. Publishers will always seek more than one route to demand, and advertisers will continue to look for multiple sources of supply, while a wider ecosystem of measurement, targeting, optimization, and verification providers depends on interoperability as a prerequisite for scale. While those paths may shrink in number over time, they must remain broadly compatible, because no single party can dictate the rules of the market.

And for independent adtech players that haven’t been swept up in consolidation, interoperability isn’t optional — it’s a matter of survival.

There has been a lot of discussion around consolidation across adtech. Does that help or hurt interoperability?

The wider media and open web ecosystem is indeed going through a period of consolidation, driven by financial headwinds and increased pressure on cost control. In that context, this consolidation can help interoperability by reducing hops between supply and demand and limiting third-party involvement.

This is already visible in SSPs introducing buying platforms and DSPs moving toward more direct access to supply, both of which aim to create a leaner and more efficient supply chain. However, it doesn’t mean the open web will splinter into mini walled gardens, each operating its own closed loop. In practice, consolidation can make interoperability easier in parts of the supply chain, but it doesn’t remove the need for systems to work together across the open web.

Why is interoperability harder to achieve than it sounds?

Simply because attempts to address fragmentation can sometimes introduce new inefficiencies. Alternative IDs are a clear example. They were designed to unify the ecosystem, but in practice, every translation adds friction — another technology layer, another vendor, or another fee.

These additional layers can make access to first-party data prohibitively expensive and slow down, or even derail, collective efforts to improve interoperability across the open web.

How does supply-side curation fit into this picture?

It definitely offers another way to activate first-party data, this time from publishers. Publishers are naturally cautious about giving up too much control to intermediaries, particularly in a supply chain that has historically commodified their inventory.

By packaging their first-party data themselves, they can preserve control while offering added-value, curated deals to advertisers. However, curation still raises questions around control and how much value is ultimately created,  and who extracts that value, once all fees are accounted for.

AI is often positioned as the solution, but is it really?

AI is intensifying the need for interoperability, while also exposing the barriers that make it difficult to achieve. On one hand, it opens new paths to overcome fragmentation, making it relatively easy to deploy AI agents that can act as a “meta DSP” to bridge multiple buying platforms, for example. On the other hand, it can reinforce existing barriers, such as siloed or poorly taxonomised data, making it harder to automate complex operations at scale or leverage the predictive power of machine learning.

Many interoperability challenges are ultimately data-scale issues. AI can help by translating disparate datasets into common taxonomies and expanding seeds of audience data into market-ready segments that can be activated across the open web and beyond.

Agentic advertising is everywhere in industry discourse. But what’s myth, and what’s genuinely realistic in programmatic?

Expectations around agentic advertising need to be tempered. In theory, agentic AI could manage the entire advertising chain and solve interoperability in one fell swoop. But programmatic trading runs in milliseconds, millions of times a second. Agent-to-agent communication introduces too much server load and latency to be workable at that scale. 

For now, AI agents are better suited to repetitive and resource-heavy tasks such as mapping inventory to audiences, optimizing supply paths, or adjusting bidding strategies. This is why most agentic AI in programmatic operates within siloed, closed-loop systems or through existing APIs, rather than through native AI-to-AI communication.

Beyond technical feasibility, there is also the question of cost. Even if a fully agent-run ecosystem were possible, it remains unclear who would bear the additional computational burden and what value that approach would deliver in return.

While early efforts around protocols like Model Context Protocol and A2A are promising, a widely adopted framework for agentic interoperability that ensures trust, governance, and transparency remains a long-term objective rather than an imminent reality. 

What will ultimately define progress for the open web?

In the near term, interoperability will continue to shape how the open web’s supply chain evolves. Those that can turn complexity into a competitive advantage will help define the next phase of open web advertising.

This will not depend on controlling the most data, but on connecting systems most effectively. Interoperability must become the default if the open web is to unlock its full potential and finally stand on equal footing with walled gardens.