• by Stephen Barnes , 5 hours ago

We're in the middle of a marketing technology boom. New platforms and tools appear every week across AI, automation, optimization and orchestration. It's overwhelming, especially for brands trying to make sense of it all.

Some of these tools are good, some are average, some are bad -- and some that haven't been invented yet will surpass all of them. That leaves marketers with a real dilemma. Which tools do you commit to? How do you know they'll work together? And what happens when the next breakthrough arrives?

It's a difficult landscape to navigate. I genuinely feel for brands trying to work it out, particularly when procurement teams are pushing for faster and cheaper. Futurist Penri Jones describes this as a request for faster horses, and that pressure often drives decisions that optimize for speed and cost while neglecting the essential idea of “better.” The result is a slow erosion of brand and creative standards.

One response is to go big with an all-encompassing platform.

WPP's global production offering is a recent example. Announced earlier this year, it's a single, unified system that promises speed, integration and scale. It's positioned as being built on open standards, and it runs on WPP Open, the company's marketing and production operating system.

There's plenty to applaud. Many of us have argued for years that interoperable USD digital twins and structured product truth should sit at the heart of modern content production. WPP's putting those principles in place, and that's a meaningful shift.

But there's open, and then there's “open.”

In practice, systems like this can use open standards while still sitting inside closed workflows. Brands may technically have portable assets, but the day-to-day ability to use, update, validate, and produce from them -- and the know-how to do so -- often sits inside the platform's tools, processes and partnerships.

That's not necessarily a problem, but it does create a form of lock-in, even if no one uses the word. Not locked in by the file -- locked in by the workflow.

A genuinely open system is something different. It puts brands back in control rather than the platform. The promise of OpenUSD and digital twins is simple: ease of movement. You're not tied to a single tool, vendor or workflow; you can adopt new technology when it appears; you can switch partners without a rebuild; you can evolve without seeking permission.

This works because master assets and rules and product reality don't live inside a system. They live with the brand.

This isn't only a technology argument, but a business one. The old agency model was built on scale, centralization and heavy structures that made sense once, but struggle in a world that rewards speed and adaptability.

The newer models build around smaller groups of experts and independents who collaborate around shared foundations and beliefs, without needing a single organization to control everything -- open rather than closed.

That's the real choice for brands today: Hand production to a large tech stack and allow more of your capability to live inside someone else's workflow, or keep your master product truth and standards inside your own organization, and let partners plug in around them. You still gain speed and savings, but you retain control, ownership and quality.

Open isn't a file format. It's where your digital truth lives and how freely it can move.