Magnite, Streamr, and the Performance Imperative
This week, Magnite, the leading SSP with particular strengths in CTV, acquired Streamr, a CTV ad startup that uses AI to automate creative development and campaign execution, expanding SMB access to the channel.
This move reflects the dominant thread in my conversations with adtech CEOs over the past year: in the Outcomes Era, the no. 1 opportunity in adtech is transforming the open internet into a performance channel capable of delivering results on par with search and social.
To do that, the open internet must solve two problems:
It has to perform, delivering incremental sales, not just impressions.
It has to be easy — as easy as setting a goal, pasting a URL, and getting results.
This is the core of the Outcomes Era: a period in which every media seller and adtech platform is expected to deliver measurable outcomes. But the Magnite-Streamr deal highlights a key insight: the performance imperative isn’t just about results. It’s also about ease.
Because the Outcomes Era is the world Google and Meta built. Not just by delivering sales but by making it easy to get them. As Mark Zuckerberg has put it: “Tell us what outcomes you want, and we’ll deliver.”
That’s how Google and Meta captured $500B in ad spend from performance marketers and SMBs. And it’s why AI changes everything: It gives the open internet a shot at matching the walled gardens on both ease and outcomes.
Historically, the open web (display and CTV) was less measurable than search and social advertising, but it was also vastly harder to use. Creative was hard. Campaign setup was hard. The stack was fragmented. And leveraging both advertiser and publisher data to drive outcomes required money, time, and expertise unavailable to most performance marketers.
AI won’t solve this all at once. But adtech companies can use it to remove the friction that makes the open internet a less attractive customer acquisition channel than the walled gardens.
That’s the lens through which to view the Magnite-Streamr acquisition. The performance TV category, which my client tvScientific helped define, involves innovations across targeting, measurement, access to premium inventory, and now, creative automation. That last piece is Streamr’s domain. With the acquisition, Magnite removes a major barrier to ease of execution in CTV and takes a meaningful step toward making open internet advertising feel more like Meta or Google.
If Magnite can pair this ease of execution with measurable performance and optimization, a problem it still needs to solve, it won’t just improve its CTV offering. It will advance the core thesis of the Outcomes Era: that the open internet can be made as easy and performant as the walled gardens.
That’s a much bigger play than conquering the SSP market. It’s a shot at capturing a meaningful share of the $500B ad market that made search and social platforms dominant in the first place. And if Magnite or another player executes — with vision, conviction, and possibly more acquisitions — they could raise the ceiling for the entire industry.
