“Inside Voices” offers expert perspectives from our team on key trends and challenges in media and advertising. Through this series, you’ll gain actionable insights and forward-thinking predictions on topics ranging from AdTech advancements to the impact of emerging technologies on audience engagement and revenue models.
AI: Simplifying Media Sales and Operations
As Skydance’s plans to acquire Paramount wind their way through court, the question of how many more acquisitions are coming weighs heavily on many media executives’ minds. Paramount, one of the oldest studios in Hollywood, represents past media giants with a history in broadcast television, movies and radio. Skydance represents the future media giants, with a diverse mix of digital assets including gaming and animation. Bringing these kinds of different media businesses together in a single portfolio can create incredible complexity depending on the company’s revenue and sales strategy.
Any M&A that has cost savings in mind, media companies often find that teams are streamlined, with fewer people to manage a wider portfolio of products. At the same time, executives often look to technology costs as a place for potential savings, leaving sales, operations and IT teams wondering how they can consolidate without losing important channel and platform capabilities.
More and more media teams are faced with:
These common issues don’t have to drag newly consolidated media companies down. There are a number of different technological innovations like AI as well as services solutions to unify insights, streamline processes and simplify complex issues.
New Tech like AI Can Improve Media Sales and Operations
For seasoned media sales and operations teams, there is always the concern that adding a new technology or new capability to the tech stack only makes things more inefficient. With many different channels and partners, all using different technologies, bringing information and processes together is already a major challenge. However, next generation technology is actually designed to reduce that problem rather than make it worse.
Generative AI is a functionality that can quickly analyze data and information from a wide variety of sources and make sense of it. Consider a typical media company’s advertising business, with proposal processes, order management, ad serving and optimization, and reporting flowing through many different systems.
AI is able to look at the information going through these systems and understand patterns, synthesize insights, and make recommendations.
Here are a few examples of how Operative is making revenue management more streamlined with AI:
Our AI is designed to be flexible, working with any configuration of channels from broadcast local ad sales to CTV and digital. Whatever a media company is selling, Operative offers an AI-driven solution to streamline and improve the process.
Flexible Services for Efficient Operations
Operative has more than twenty years of experience supporting media companies, and one thing we know especially well is the cyclical and volatile nature of the business. Even the most efficient operation is subject to the Q4 spike in demand, summer slump and infusions of spending from things like the upcoming election.
Multiply those external influences on a huge multichannel media company and the effects get much more pronounced. No media company can have the perfectly staffed media operation for every scenario, which is why many of the world’s largest rely on our services. We deliver a flexible support layer that complements our innovative tech, enabling companies to flex with the changes in their business without taking on the added costs of hiring and managing staff.
Combining technology solutions with the most advanced AI and a suite of customizable services shows just how deeply Operative has invested in creating solutions for every type of media company and every element of their revenue operations needs. As media companies face more consolidation and M&A in the future, Operative is there to deliver results, not added complexity.
