The streaming industry ended 2023 with more questions than answers. What promised to be a transformative year was disrupted by a conservative TV ad market and multiple Hollywood strikes, and once-urgent calls to solve industry pain points such as measurement and data fragmentation petered out in the mix.

To refocus alongside the new year, Ad Age asked leading streaming and media agency executives what industry norms they would like to leave behind in 2023 (measurement, high CPMs and two-week cancellation terms are on the list) and what streaming developments will trend in 2024 (spoiler: bundling and consolidation).

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Joe Earley, president of direct-to-consumer, Disney

Leave in 2023: While we’ve yet to fully understand the impact on the industry and those whose livelihoods depend on it, I’m relieved to leave the strikes behind in 2023.

Trend in 2024: One trend in streaming that I think will continue to grow in 2024 is bundling.

Dani Benowitz, president, Magna Global

Leave in 2023: I’m ready to leave measurement in 2023. While we can all agree it’s an important challenge that we need to solve for as an industry, there is still much work to be done until we can progress the conversation in a way that actually moves the needle. As the streaming players and measurement providers continue to work towards an apples-to-apples solution to crystalize measurement and attribution, we need more action and less talking.

Trend in 2024: With privacy concerns continuing to grow and an increased need for shared data consolidation across partners and platforms, we expect more publishers will find ways to permission their data responsibly. To that end, I think we’re going to hear a lot more about clean rooms and data interoperability, which ultimately could also contribute towards better measurement. I also believe we’re going to see more consolidation both in the way parent companies are streamlining their offerings for advertisers and in how consumers bundle.  This will essentially recreate a cable-like model for the streaming age.

Related: Why connected TV is the next frontier in the privacy debate

Kelly Campbell, president, Peacock

Leave in 2023: I’d like to leave behind the idea that streaming success is a zero-sum game—2023 has shown us that it’s possible for a film to be No. 1 at the box office and the No. 1 film across streaming. Streaming can boost linear and vice versa. As the industry continues to evolve, I hope we can also expand our collective perception of what success can be.

Trend in 2024: Engagement is becoming the most-discussed metric in streaming for good reason. Advertising-supported direct-to-consumer businesses like ours rely on customers choosing us on a daily basis.

Watch: Kelly Campbell breaks down Peacock’s audience strategy

David Campanelli, executive VP, chief investment officer, Horizon Media

Leave in 2023: Outside of Apple TV+, I’m glad we’re past the question of “will they add an ad tier?”  With Prime Video adding a commercial tier, that finally ends that discussion.

Trend in 2024: Bundling, bundling, bundling. We’re already starting to see it. But the future of streaming is the individual streamers coming together, potentially with a third party platform or service to bundle services together to lower cost in totality to the consumer, but significantly increase retention and slow churn. Sounds a lot like cable.

Rita Ferro, president, global advertising, Disney

Leave in 2023: Applying linear measurement frameworks to streaming.

Trend in 2024: Aggregation and discoverability of content. It’s important to make it easier for consumers to find their favorite content while also discovering new content. With the proliferation of consumer options across the marketplace in both AVOD and FAST platforms, fragmentation of content and quality creates opportunity for those with their own data and technology stacks to create viewer-first engagement platforms. This makes it easier for consumers to enjoy their favorite content while also seamlessly creating a better platform for advertisers that enables better targeting, engagement and outcomes.

Lisa Herdman, senior VP, executive director national video investment and marketplace intelligence, RPA

Leave in 2023: I would love for the discussion around streaming being used for lower-funnel performance marketing to take a pause—for a bit. At some point it may be a thing, but for now its most important use is as a reach extension to help supplement linear TV’s decline. I would also love to see the “measurement wars” be less of a war and more of a collaborative effort—we need choices given brands’ need to reach various audiences.

I would like to leave Netflix’s non-existent marketing of their ad tier in 2023 and see them market the heck out of it in 2024.

Trend in 2024: We will see more impressions available, hopefully not because the ad loads will increase per streamer, but because options like Amazon Prime Video’s decision to make their current offering all ad-supported, as well as bundling opportunities that will lower prices and enable consumers to sign on to more ad-supported platforms. Additionally, I think we will make a ton of progress in the video cross-platform (linear and streaming) planning and measurement space. 

Read more: How Amazon Prime pitched its ad tier to brands

Kim Kelleher, chief commercial officer, AMC Networks

Leave in 2023: Let’s leave streaming wars in 2023 and move into streaming partnerships and bundles for 2024.

Trend in 2024: Let’s lean into the value and potential of partnerships and bundles to meet our shared customers’ needs. Let’s make things easier, less confusing and more economically attractive across the entire distribution ecosystem for all of the viewers and marketers we serve.

Kelly Metz, chief investment officer, OMD

Leave in 2023: Lack of transparency around streaming viewership. All streamers who are serious about selling ads should publish their monthly reach numbers so we can appropriately plan.

Trend in 2024: I think this is less of a forecast and more of a ground truth: more ads are coming in 2024 to previously ad-free streamers. The industry needs to do this right. We must manage the ad experience at a more granular level across these new ad-supported opportunities. Frequency controls and ad adjacency in ad pods are the easy wins and best opportunity to manage that experience.

Matt McDonald, global head of connected TV and streaming, Google

Leave in 2023: It’s time to move on from the idea that the connected TV ad market is fragmented. This past year, much has been written about the proliferation of streaming services and viewer fragmentation that makes it difficult to cut through the evolving streaming landscape. Only a handful of platforms have material scale for advertisers. Just like there was a “Big Three” of TV, I anticipate there will similarly be a handful of primary players with large audiences and diverse content corpuses in the years to come. 

Trend in 2024: The market fixation I’d like to see next year is returning to the overall promise of connected TV. CTV is about leveraging the best of digital to improve the traditional TV experience. The industry has made great strides innovating solutions familiar to traditional TV advertisers like awareness and brand consideration. However, I’m eager to see ad format innovation deliver online sales at scale on the big screen. This will also enable a real step change in areas like commerce, which is in its infancy on the big screen.

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Alan Moss, VP of global ad sales, Amazon Ads

Leave in 2023: We’ve seen the shift from linear to digital across all media. This has been great for customers in terms of choice. However, it has created a lot of fragmentation and friction.

Trend in 2024: We’re working to solve that by making a single destination for viewers to find everything they’re looking for in one place. Having one app—one destination—means everyone spends less time searching and more time watching. It’s a friction-free consumer experience.

More: Advertisers aren't moving to streaming as quickly as viewers

Fernando Romero, senior VP, U.S. digital advertising sales at TelevisaUnivision

Leave in 2023: The standing IAB two-week cancellation term for streaming deals/media buys should be left in 2023. As more audiences, content, data, technologies, platforms and infrastructure get invested, the media economics should be readjusted to both allow for continued media buyer flexibility but also more media seller stability. Too much is being invested on all sides of the business for pricing and cancellation clauses to limit our collective growth.

Trend in 2024: Consumer fatigue will become even more rampant, making marketing and differentiation even more critical with the increased competition for streaming dollars. With the growth of FAST channels…advertisers can’t assume a one-size-fits-all approach, and should be looking for new avenues to reach growth audiences within premium content.

Jon Steinlauf, chief U.S. advertising sales officer, Warner Bros. Discovery

Leave in 2023: The industry should move away from commoditizing streaming environments and CTV inventory in general. While this sector of our industry is one of the fastest growing, it is highly nuanced. Audiences, content titles and genres, ad loads and engagement vary by product and device. 

Trend in 2024: Continued marketplace recognition and excitement around the user experience and how it drives performance in premium streaming advertising, driving collective benefits for the consumer and marketing partners.

Shelby Saville, U.S. Chief Investment Officer for Publicis Media Exchange (PMX)

Leave in 2023: Two things I would leave behind are high streaming prices and closed video ecosystems. As an industry, one of our greatest challenges has been increasing fragmentation and this, coupled with the high cost of entry, has made it harder and harder to reach and unify audiences in an efficient way.

Trend in 2024: I think we’ll see one of the hottest competitive markets in 2024 as the channel matures. This will come in the form of ownership consolidation, channel convergence for areas like RMN [retail media networks] and streaming, as well as increased ad-supported supply, which will open up opportunities for advertisers.

Ilya Pozin, founder and CEO, Telly

Leave in 2023: End the double dip. It's time for streaming services to choose—ads or subscription, not both. The hybrid model of charging subscription fees while still showing ads isn’t pleasing anyone and only further fragments the marketplace.

Trend in 2024: TV ad budgets are shrinking because brands get better performance out of digital advertising that drives action and ROAS. In 2024, new technologies are going to allow the biggest screen in the home to drive the kind of performance outcomes that were previously only available on web and mobile.

Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer, GroupM U.S.

Leave in 2023: Buying based on demos had its time and we are moving away from that. We are looking to engage with audiences wherever they are, whenever they are there; we are looking to leverage privacy-compliant data to identify audiences, across screens and within relevant content environments, to ensure advertising is more effective and welcome.

We’d love to see interoperability evolve from talk to action—let talk be a thing of the past. Across the ecosystem, everyone realizes the challenges advertisers are presented with when one system doesn’t talk to another. But that’s as far as it goes. Coming together to solve that problem for the collective benefit of our advertising partners is what will drive more impactful and attributable business outcomes, and that success will fuel the ad-supported ecosystem for everyone involved.

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Trend in 2024: Streaming will cement itself as a vehicle for end-to-end commerce. Building on advances in social commerce, customized storefront experiences and addressable messaging within streaming offerings will give brands the exposure they need to close the loop between impression and purchase action, as consumers discover relevant products and services.

Dina Roman, SVP, global ad sales, Fubo

Leave in 2023: Fragmentation across streaming, and especially sports content, has reached an inflection point. Consumers have grown frustrated with the increasing number of subscriptions required to watch all of their programming and advertisers are challenged with reaching their strategic target audiences across a growing number of media partners and devices. Now is the time when the power of aggregation will show its value and we will see a return to bundling across streaming. We have to continue to work as an industry to make life easier for consumers and by extension, advertisers. 

Trend in 2024: Measurement continues to be a hot topic in streaming and we will see certain metrics come to the forefront. One of these focus areas is analyzing viewers’ cross-channel engagement and attention in ways that can prove outcomes of CTV ad campaigns. The TV industry is increasingly working to show the value of CTV for advertisers and these metrics help solve for that.

Kristina Shepard, VP of global advertising sales and partnerships, Roku

Leave in 2023: It’s time to realize that streaming is TV. The future opportunity for marketers is to think of streaming not just as an incremental add-on; 18 to 34-year-olds haven't spent most of their TV time on linear TV [in years], yet many marketers are still allocating large media budgets to linear TV. It’s time we leave these outdated notions behind in 2023.

Trend in 2024: The brands that turn to streaming from the start and embrace platform advantages will get the most out of their marketing investment. In 2024, streaming advertisers will implement innovative new strategies to reach specific audiences at scale with data-driven precision and creative impact that surpasses linear TV. We’re going to see more big brands leverage streaming as a centerpiece of their marketing efforts because they’ll see streaming deliver value at every stage of the buying journey—from attracting new customers all the way to influencing purchases.

Deirdre Thomas, chief product officer, Nielsen

Leave in 2023: I’d like to leave the time-consuming discovery process behind in 2023. From actually finding a show, to figuring out how and where to watch it, there is a real opportunity to improve user experience for content discovery.

Trend in 2024: Looking ahead to 2024, the theme is convergent TV—or the merging of linear and streaming. As [Nielsen’s] The Gauge [monthly report of viewership share per channel] shows, 37% of people's TV usage is via streaming, as compared to 30% via cable and 25% via broadcast. As an industry, we need to redefine TV to reflect consumers’ behavior and include both linear and streaming.