Ben, can you tell us about the recent partnership between Operative and Audience Platform? What are the main objectives of this collaboration?
Our partnership is a major leap forward in cross-channel advertising using multiple currencies for ROI, attribution, reach and frequency. Rather than focusing on singular currencies and metrics like GRPs and impressions, forward-thinking advertisers want to leverage multiple KPIs that tie more closely with true business outcomes and ROI. This requires platforms that can bring data together from different advertising channels including linear TV, CTV and conventional digital, in order to facilitate (and optimize) the end-to-end process…from media buying to delivery to billing. Operative has a full suite of advertising revenue management capabilities to support the entire workflow, with Audience Platform in place to facilitate critical back-end processes including invoicing, billing, and reconciliation. Together, we can provide sell-side clients with the most comprehensive end-to-end solution in the market.
The news mentions that the partnership aims to deliver a groundbreaking end-to-end advertising solution to support next-generation currencies. Could you explain what these next-gen currencies are and how they are different from traditional currencies in advertising?
Of course. Let’s focus on a traditional currency like CPM – the price of 1,000 advertising impressions. As a currency, CPM is somewhat arbitrary, as in, it’s not directly tied to the real business value that any one advertiser gets from an ad placement. And that requires advertisers to do a lot of complex math to connect impressions and CPMs to actual business outcomes. For example, the CPM of high-quality streaming content is going to be much higher than the CPM of lower quality online video on a website, but CPM neither tells us if one helps drive the advertisers’ business goal more effectively than the other. It is difficult for advertisers to know, at face value, if that high-CPM ad placement is worth the extra cost, or if the low-CPM ad placement is too low quality for the brand. In order to determine the cost/value equation clients need to tie impressions to business outcomes and use attribution and/or conversion analysis to measure the real business value/ROI of their media investment. Doing this for every media placement and channel across thousands of media properties is an incredibly complex exercise without automation and a truly scalable platform. Our partnership creates an opportunity to enable publishers with a scalable end-to-end workflow to provide multi-currency capabilities as a part of the standard offering to advertisers.
What specific challenges do media companies face when it comes to supporting next-gen currencies for their advertiser clients? How does this partnership address those challenges?
Advertisers want to be able to purchase media, optimize campaigns and obtain reporting and billing with much greater velocity than in the past. To do that publishers need scalable platforms that can process massive amounts of data in a fully automated way. Operative delivers this via a modern cloud-native platform that can scale for publishers of all sizes…whether that is a large, diversified global media company or a small, niche streaming service. Our dynamic workflow automation tools enable publishers to respond to RFPs, perform order management, track and optimize ad buys and campaigns in a way that would simply be impossible manually or with disparate tools. Together with Audience Platform, we extend those capabilities from end-to-end. Advertisers are looking for publishers to align audience measurement currencies used during campaign planning to next generation currencies in invoices that they actually pay for. This requires the same level of data granularity and data scale which currently doesn’t exist in the marketplace. Audience Platform enables the scale and automation for financial reporting and billing so that the entire process can flow seamlessly between advertiser and publisher and back again.
How does this partnership align with the broader industry trends and the future direction of advertising and media companies?
The combination of data and technology has dramatically changed the way advertisers buy media. The days of sitting in a restaurant with a few network execs and planning out a year’s upfront buy is long gone. Even a single contract between an advertiser and publisher contains thousands if not tens of thousands of different types of ads across TV, digital, CTV, video, mobile, gaming, the list goes on. That requires an enormous amount of computing power to manage, automate, optimize and transact on. If one element doesn’t align, then the entire dance falls apart. Operative and Audience Platform are like the conductors that keep the music going. Together we empower publishers with data and technology to expand what they can do for advertisers. They can create highly specialized product offerings, deliver against them and transact against them in a way that can scale and change over time as the market scales and changes.
Are there any plans to collaborate with other technology providers or expand partnerships beyond the Audience Platform to further enhance the solution?
Operative is first and foremost part of the advertising technology ecosystem. We are deeply integrated with a number of technology providers, all with the goal of supporting publishers to make the most from their inventory. Our specific Audience Platform partnership will deepen and strengthen over time. Our initial integration is in use now by a few large publishers, and their feedback will determine how we expand. It’s likely we’ll develop shared reporting, share more data between our systems, and make it easier for different groups to use both of our platforms in tandem.
Can you share any insights into the market demand for next-gen currency solutions and how it is expected to evolve in the coming years?
I think that advertisers will continue to push for multi-currency capabilities. Sophisticated advertisers have been creating media plans based on attribution models for years, and they are just now able to activate those models on an end-to-end basis. Once they get used to actually buying based on business outcome there is little reason to return to a single proxy metric like GRP or CPM. It’s uncertain whether a single, dominant cross-platform currency will prevail so in the meantime we believe that both publishers and advertisers will need to support multiple currencies across the entire advertising workflow.
What role does Operative envision for itself in shaping the future of cross-channel advertising and next-gen currencies?
Operative has been providing content and advertising solutions for publishers for decades. We are now a key driver in media convergence as publishers attempt to unify disparate media channels, ad tech, datasets and direct and indirect sales channels. We have extremely close partnerships with our customers, who are most of the world’s largest publishers and media companies and they inform our product roadmap. We see the future because we’re building the future. So what that means in practice is that we’re building for the day when convergence is a reality, when next-gen currencies are being used at scale, and when advertisers expect end-to-end converged media buying based on their currency of choice across channels. That sounds like a lot, but it’s going to happen in the next few years.
How does this partnership with Audience Platform contribute to Operative’s overall growth strategy and vision for the future?
We have long focused on the workflow and revenue management elements of the media business, from RFP and IO creation through to ad ops and yield optimization. However, we have not managed the financial and billing aspect of the transaction and believe that Audience Platform has created a very compelling and complementary solution that fits perfectly with our vision for the future. They also believe in next-gen currency, automation and convergence across channels and share many of our customers. To provide a viable solution, publishers are looking for an integrated solution that can address the opportunities brought by the next-generation currencies. By working together, we can deliver the best of open-ended tech as mission-specific modules or an integrated end-to-end platform, allowing publishers to focus on what they do best, attracting audiences and selling inventory.
Looking ahead, what are some of the key milestones or goals that Operative aims to achieve in the near future?
We grow in two ways, by increasing our current customer relationships and by building new customer relationships. We have recently announced AOS, our modern cloud-based system, and are excited for many of our current customers to move to this highly scalable system so that they are set up for future growth and success. At the same time, at a global scale we are bringing on new customers as they start to prioritize revenue management.
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Ben Tatta, Chief Commercial Officer at Operative
Ben Tatta oversees sales, marketing and partnerships at Operative as Chief Commercial Officer. He has more than 25 years of traditional and digital media experience heading media sales, technology, and measurement businesses. Ben has made his mark in media leading innovation over the years, most notably as co-founder and president of advanced TV analytics company 605 and during his tenure at Cablevision as President of Media Sales where he launched the industry's first system-wide deployment of addressable TV advertising. He has held senior leadership roles at companies including USA Networks, IBM, ABC, Lagardere Media and eBay Enterprise Marketing. He received a B.A. in Economics from Villanova University. LinkedIn.