Simplifying the Open Web

The open web is where people spend the majority of their time online, reading the news, following sport, exploring culture and discovering new ideas. Yet despite accounting for around 61% of online attention, the majority of programmatic advertising budgets still flow to social platforms.

According to SeenThis CEO Jesper Benon, the reason isn’t the value of the audience or the quality of the environments. It’s complexity.

“For years, activating the open web has been fragmented and technically challenging,” Benon explains. “Concerns around brand safety, targeting, delivery performance and ad fraud have created friction that made large platforms easier to scale.”

But that dynamic is starting to shift.

Benon points to several structural changes reshaping how brands and agencies approach media planning. Rising platform CPMs, increasing privacy regulation and the gradual leveling of targeting capabilities are pushing advertisers to reconsider how and where they invest. At the same time, advances in automation and AI are reducing operational complexity across planning, activation and optimisation.

“Diversification is no longer just a discussion,” says Benon. “Brands are now setting real allocation targets for the open web.”

For SeenThis, the opportunity lies in solving one of the web’s most persistent technical challenges: video delivery. Historically, distributing high-quality video across the open web has been expensive and unreliable, often forcing advertisers to compromise between reach, cost and creative quality.

SeenThis’ adaptive streaming technology was built to remove those barriers. By dynamically streaming video assets impression-by-impression, the technology ensures instant loading and full creative quality while optimising performance in real time.

The result? A more efficient way for brands to reach audiences across premium publisher environments without sacrificing speed or user experience.

But Benon believes the implications go beyond campaign performance.

“If we can remove the technical friction from the open web, we unlock enormous commercial potential for advertisers,” he says. “At the same time, we support the publishers and creators who depend on advertising revenue to produce independent journalism, local news and specialist content.”

In that sense, simplifying the open web isn’t just about making media buying easier. It’s about ensuring a healthier and more balanced digital ecosystem.

Read the full interview with Jesper Benon here.