FORT LAUDERDALE — Some media companies, especially the smaller ones, just don’t have the kind of scaled inventory many advertisers are looking for.

So Operative, an ad tech platform operator which lets publishers manage their online ad space, is encouraging some of its customers to pool their slots. The outfit says it is launching a program called “partner premium”.

“it’s really designed for all these companies that are on Operative to share inventory with each other in a safe place… in an ad-tech tax-free environment,” says CEO Lorne Brown in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We have big companies like Comcast and Cox and NBC that have lots of demand, lots of specialties, and we have supply-side people who would very willingly give their inventory to another Operative customer before they gave it to a programmatic company.”

Supply-side inventory cooperatives have cropped up in the last year, like Pangea Alliance involving several UK publishers, 1XL also in the UK, La Place in France and several in Latin America.

Operative’s is less formal than that, and keeps the deals optional between consenting publishers.

“A lot of the MSOs and the MVPDs already have relationships with programmers and cablenets, so it’s very natural for them to work together. They may be more inclined to work together than to say Google or Facebook. For a lot of people, it’s the devil you know when it comes to pushing out your inventory to somebody else.”

 

 

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page