The buying dilemma
New AI, automation and orchestration tools arrive almost weekly, and brands are left guessing which to commit to and whether they will still fit together when the next breakthrough lands. Steve’s sympathy sits with brands caught in that bind, especially when procurement pushes for faster and cheaper. Borrowing futurist Penri Jones’ phrase – “a demand for faster horses” – he warns that optimising for speed and cost quietly erodes brand and creative standards.
There’s open, and then there’s “open”
WPP’s global production offering, running on WPP Open, is the current example of the all-in-one answer: a unified system promising speed, integration and scale, positioned as built on open standards. Steve gives it real credit, because interoperable USD digital twins and structured product truth belong at the heart of modern production. The catch is that open standards can still sit inside closed workflows. A brand may hold portable assets on paper, but the ability to use, update, and produce from them often lies within the platform’s tools and partnerships. That is lock-in by another name. Not locked in by the file, locked in by the workflow.
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Open isn't a file format. It's where your digital truth lives and how freely it can move.Steve Barnes
ECD & Co-Founder, Collective
What genuine openness looks like
A truly open system puts the brand back in control rather than the platform. That is the real promise of OpenUSD and digital twins: ease of movement. You can adopt new technology as it emerges, switch partners without a rebuild, and evolve without asking permission because master assets, rules, and product reality live with the brand rather than inside a system.
The choice is stark. Hand production to a large tech stack and let more of your capability live inside someone else’s workflow, or keep your master product truth in-house and let partners plug in around it. Either way, you gain speed and savings. Only one route keeps control, ownership and quality.
Read the full article
Read Steve Barnes’ full piece on Media Post.
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