I had the great pleasure of moderating a panel yesterday in San Francisco at the TV of Tomorrow conference, on driving transparency in identity and measurement in CTV advertising. Three industry pioneers and long-time leaders were panelists: Nada Bradbury, CEO of Ad-ID; Tom Morgan, CEO of Media.TV; and Scott McKinley, CEO of Truthset.

I’m writing about this event because we actually came together on key assumptions and shared struggles that define the CTV ad industry's future, and some winning strategies for players that weren't one of the two massive walled garden platforms.

Unsurprisingly, we all agreed that identity and measurement are a mess today on CTV, as is most of the viewer experience. How many times can we all see the same Capital One ad in the same show over and over again?

Also unsurprisingly, we all agreed that our industry doesn’t lack technology to solve the sector’s problems. We also noted that finding ways to leverage “true” viewer identity across the majority of the streaming video platforms, services and publishers would be a critical fulcrum to scale the streaming ad world beyond the massive organic growth of major walled garden platforms like Google's YouTube and Amazon. Both platforms have massive advantages in robust and fully integrated identity data for their streaming ad businesses.

After we discussed the topic, no one thought that actions by large brands and agencies -- despite their rhetoric on the topic -- were likely to drive the adoption of better and more transparent identity and measurement. Neither sets of actors tend to be change agents in our industry these days, and all have a certain comfort with the status quo, particularly without someone willing to step up and pay higher fees to fix it.

Tom Morgan drove home the point that the CTV market couldn’t support the cost of deep identity infrastructure without exponentially more advertisers than the single digit thousands that use national TV today. The math on granular campaigns and inventory yields won’t work unless we can make CTV work for hundreds of thousands or millions of advertisers, as search and social have done.

Scott McKinley urged us not to recreate a world of yesterday like linear TV, catering to big brands in categories like consumer packaged goods -- but instead, to build the CTV industry for the future and for the same kinds of small and mid-sized advertisers, whose adoption of Google first and then Facebook second propelled those companies to “hockey stick” growth in both pricing and revenue over the past 15 years.

Nada Bradbury made the point that the adoption of cross-platform identity, not just for viewers, but for advertising's creative assets, would be the way to both connect, standardize and create consistency with advertisers' experiences across both the “open” web of the non-walled-garden publishers, as well as walled gardens.

Basically, we all agreed -- as hard as it was to admit -- that pulling together a critical mass of the major players among brands, streaming publishers and CTV platforms would not provide the answer. That wasn’t going to be the way to build a true counterweight and complement to the massive market share that Amazon and Google are certain to own and grow as the world of linear TV advertising shifts to streaming and CTV over the next decade.

The only way to get there is to build the CTV ad industry’s future with the interests of local plumbers -- not Procter & Gamble -- at the center.

What do you think?