LOS ANGELES — When you already facilitate a gargantuan chunk of media spending, any improvements you make to the platform could yield huge results.

That is the place at which Mediaocean finds itself.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, Mediaocean, explains the areas his company is focused on improving for 2022.

Scale of the ocean

Mediaocean has a global footprint with 1,500 employees across 30 offices worldwide. About $200 billion in annualized media spending goes through its platform, or about a third of the global total.

For more than 50 years,  Mediaocean, formerly known as Donavan Data Systems, has been the software solution of choice for both TV advertisers and sellers, powering ad management, inventory and billing.

With the acquisition of 4C, Mediaocean became a cross-platform company that expanded beyond its roots to planning, optimization and measurement.

But Gupta says the new world is all about scaling audience-driven planning, buying and measurement.

Total data

“The value’s been proven, but now it’s all about how do you scale that?,” he says in this interview with ex NBCUniversal SVP, Advanced Advertising and Data, Denise Colella, recorded at the Beet Retreat, Santa Monica, in November 2021.

“Why shouldn’t all advertising be audience-driven, all the way from planning measurement to optimization?

“If you think about it from that lens, you automatically think about some challenges for agencies. They’re the ones who are on the front lines, trying to execute a whole bunch of this stuff.

“Workflow alone doesn’t cut it. You have to layer on two other concepts into this foundational infrastructure,” Gupta says.

Three layers of efficiency

Here are the two extra efficiency pushes Gupta thinks the industry needs:

Automation

“Today, agencies send out requests for proposals, you get inventory back, you analyse that inventory to see if it meets your needs or not, but you do that in a different system and in a lot of using offline data.”

Intelligence

“Whether it’s a planner or a buyer or someone else is making their decisions, you have to infuse intelligence right there. They shouldn’t have to go to a different system to do that.”

Beyond point solutions

After a year in which Mediaocean acquired Flashtalking for $500 million, Gupta is bullish about the company’s roadmap.

“What we are working towards … is to start bringing together workflow automation and intelligence in that foundational infrastructure that helps agencies move away from point solutions to doing this at scale,” he adds.

“That fundamentally means that other partners in the ecosystem, the supply side of data and measurement need to hook into this system so that we make lives easier for everyone.”

You are watching coverage from Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2021, presented by FreeWheel, IRIS.TV, Samba TV, TransUnion & Warner Music Group. For more videos, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews