Beeswax Integrates with Operative: Because It Ain’t Easy Selling Media

Big traditional media companies have serious problems these days. Declining TV viewership, fragmented digital audiences, competition with the digital giants, and an uncertain environment all add up to enormous bottom-line pressure.

This is precisely why we just announced a unique partnership with Operative. The integration between Beewax’s platform and Operative’s order management system enables media companies to streamline and simplify their workflow. Find out more in our case study.

You see, back in the day, media companies were restricted to selling only the inventory available on their own websites. Some larger publishers brought in additional sites on a “rep” basis to sell as well, typically when the media company was in a vertical like automotive or finance.

More recently, with the emergence of programmatic ad exchanges, media companies have been able to extend their audiences as a way of gaining additional traffic and filling orders that their owned-and-operated properties couldn’t reach. While “audience extension” has been around for almost ten years, it has emerged recently as a key tactic for savvy publishers given declining endemic audiences and revenue growth pressures.

Still, there remain numerous challenges that publishers face when pursuing audience extension strategies, including:

• Maintaining margins when buying third party inventory
• Assuring quality of inventory
• Preventing data leakage
• Avoiding duplicate workflow

While we believe Beeswax is a great solution to all of these problems, let’s take a moment to describe how today’s solution solves the workflow challenge.

Typically used by publishers to allow sales teams to build proposals and push those proposals into various ad serving systems, Operative continues to be the gold standard for order management among major media companies. However, audience extension, as a technique, is not a part of the publisher ad serving stack. Rather, it is executed using DSPs or ad networks. So for publishers with robust audience extension businesses, every order needs to be manually keyed-in to a new system, with new reporting, targeting, reconciliation, etc. And the consequence is severe inefficiency, leading to missed opportunities and wasted resources.

With the Beeswax-Operative integration, the orders can be pushed seamlessly into Beeswax’s Buzz UI with the same targeting, delivery options, and meta-data that is pushed into the publisher ad server. Delivery data can also be pulled back into Operative, giving the sales and ops teams what they need to get their job done.

As we take steps to bridge the silos between traditional and digital media channels, we look forward to helping publishers get more revenue, with less hassle.