Observed Signal · Oct 15, 2025 · Conference · Source: Adzine · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Open Web Needs Alliances to Combat Big Tech Dominance
Online Ad Summit 2025 emphasized the need for market-wide alliances to bolster the Open Web against Big Tech's dominance in Social, Search, and Retail. Although the ad market grows, the Open Web's content-media segment remains stagnating, prompting the
Industry-wide emphasis on market-wide alliances, standardized IDs, and server-side adtech to counter Big Tech; signals potential industry-wide impact.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Online Ad Summit 2025 urged market-wide alliances to strengthen the Open Web against Big Tech's dominance.
- Daniel Knapp, Chief Economist of IAB Europe, urged publishers to form partnerships and develop new media products emphasizing brand safety and trust.
- OWM called for a unified deterministic ID to improve cross-platform addressability as part of its seven-point plan.
- Annalect and United Internet Media showcased Clean Room ID-based strategies that extend reach and improve performance.
- IAB Tech Lab is developing a framework to regulate AI interfaces and crawling, piloting a Trusted-Server-Initiative to move adtech processes to servers, with Google participating.
Connected Companies & Entities
4 Entities mappedRelated Market Signals & Shifts
Recent verified developments and strategic activity across this market segment.
Open Web Standards: Key to AdTech's 2026 Growth
The 2025 German digital advertising landscape showed growth largely driven by Walled Gardens, while the Open Web lagged. OVK/BVDW forecast about 8.8% growth for the online display and video market in 2025, but the Open Web’s gains were uneven as large media groups faced cautious ad budgets and declines, with TV broadcasters among those seeing reduced ad spend. Looking to 2026, AI is presented as a foundational capability in AdTech, with emphasis on model quality, transparency of decision logic, and actionable integration into strategy. Attention is identified as the key currency, with expectations for a unified Attention-Quality Score and cross-industry collaboration (IAB and MRC), alongside OWM’s push for independent, auditable, and neutral measurement to steer spend back toward the Open Web. Targeting and data quality are set to improve through platform-agnostic IDs, while market consolidation favors strong technology players. Video/CTV remains central, with Europe’s CTV ad-views up 31% in H1 2025 (Freewheel). Nestlé Deutschland’s Maike Abel highlights open-web standards and brand safety.
Open Web's Path: Embrace Standards for Growth
Ahead of ADZINE CONNECT 2026, industry leaders discussed how the Open Web can remain competitive with Walled Gardens by leveraging its strengths—transparency, contextual quality and cross-publisher control—while addressing technical and measurement gaps. Speakers argued Open RTB works well for single-impression programmatic trading but does not cover many premium, private-deal and direct-booking use cases. Measurement (notably attention metrics and cross-platform frequency capping) and fragmented standards for contextual targeting, identity and creatives are cited as key obstacles. Proposed remedies included new abstraction layers around campaign goals, allowing external measurement in closed platforms, adoption of deterministic identity where applicable, and protocols such as the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) and agentic systems to reduce complexity.
Agentic Media Buying Needs Malware Guardrails: PropellerAds View
As agentic AI takes on more media buying decisions, PropellerAds' Head of Marketing argues that performance optimization must be paired with security signals. Citing IAB research, 96% of buyers are aware of agentic AI, and 66% are increasing focus on it. PropellerAds' own Q2 2026 ads safety data shows a rise in malware-related rejections, from 23.3% to 45.9% of all rejected campaigns, while total rejections fell 42%. Cloaking remains persistent at 67.3% of advertiser suspensions. The author advocates for integrating security signals into the decision loop, using a 'second set of traffic lights' approach. Human review should focus on ambiguous cases, and agents should have audit trails for explainability. The piece reflects PropellerAds' perspective as a sponsor, not market-wide data.
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