Dive Brief:
- BuzzFeed, Vice Media, Vox and Refinery29 have taken a fairly firm stance against ad tech, particularly programmatic ad sales on their websites.
- One ad tech firm, however, does pass muster with the group of digital publishers – Operative Media. Its technology that helps those media groups manage their own internal ad inventories.
- But by not taking part in programmatic ad sales, those publishers are risking missing out on a larger than $10 billion marketplace last year, a number that likely grew this year.
Dive Insight:
Operative Media is the exception ad tech firm that proves the rule that the newest group of digital publishers avoid ad tech, such as programmatic ad sales, on their websites. Operative Media gets a pass because its tech is designed to help those media companies follow their chosen paths by applying technology to manage their internally created ad inventory, as well as other back-end ad housekeeping processes like maximizing ad inventory revenue and generating invoices.
The new breed publishers have a few reasons for handling ad sales internally rather than through automated programmatic exchanges. For one, they have more control over the ad content their audience gets exposed to, potentially providing a better user experience. A PricewaterhouseCoopers and Interactive Advertising Bureau study on programmatic ad sales found more than half of the over $10 billion spent on programmatic ads in 2014 went to ad tech companies and not the publishers serving the ads.
Lorne Brown, CEO and president of Operative Media, speaking on most ad tech firms told the Wall Street Journal, “All these companies are glorified rep firms. They are interested in taking margins on their partners’ media sales. It’s ridiculous.”
What differentiates Operative Media, he said, is "we become like their air traffic control system, and they have all the control."
