Frankly to Use Operative Compete; More to Come

This week, we announced our new partnership with Frankly Media, the arm of Frankly Inc. that provides digital advertising services for more than 200 broadcaster websites across the country. Frankly will be using Operative Compete to optimize the programmatic advertising that they sell on behalf of their broadcaster clients, including companies like Meredith and Raycom. We’re thrilled to be working with Frankly, which, like Operative, focuses on creating revenue for media companies in a time of great complexity and change. In the future, we see more media companies integrating TV and digital sales processes as the two channels start to converge for consumers and advertisers. Publishers will need to focus on driving maximum revenue for every impression they serve, and having flexible tools to sell, deliver and reconcile easily across direct and programmatic channels is a key driver of success.

In this vein, this partnership marks the nexus of two important trends in the industry — the rise of programmatic advertising and the move many TV companies are making into digital media.

As the leader of a company that’s served publishers for more than 15 years, I haven’t seen anything grow as quickly or as confusingly as programmatic. We’ve seen so many of our longtime publisher clients working to maximize programmatic revenue with few resources and too much complexity. Operative Compete was created as a way to solve for these pain points, helping programmatic teams analyze and optimize their waterfall more frequently and taking control of their inventory back from middlemen. Due to high demand and wild success, we’re now working to launch the next phase of Compete, with plans to release a full-featured product this summer.

I’m also excited that more TV media companies are embracing these digital revenue streams and the platforms that will help them maximize their revenue. As digital and TV merge, it’s important for media companies to have a strategy in place to decrease complexity, increase transparency and ensure that they can sell all of their inventory effectively across channels. Advertisers follow consumers, so it’s up to media companies to serve as the bridge between these two groups. I think that the partnership with Frankly is just the beginning. As TV companies become more invested in digital media, we’ll see these types of partnerships evolve and grow. I can’t wait to be part of the story as it unfolds.