LONDON — As streaming and social platforms muscle their way into the mainstream, the media landscape has fractured into a kaleidoscope of disconnected inventory, with broadcasters, trying to figure out how to sell it across a sprawling ecosystem.
The result is often a manual, time-consuming struggle to unify ad sales and present a coherent offering to buyers who increasingly demand cross-platform reach.
To solve matters, the industry must focus on allowing linear and digital systems to interoperate rather than exist in silos, said Ben Tatta, Chief Strategy Officer at Operative, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
The paradox of consolidation
Ongoing industry consolidation can often exacerbate technical fragmentation in the short term, as distinct tech stacks collide under one roof following mergers.
“In the near term, what it’ll lead to is even a broader number of different systems and technology as companies come together,” Tatta said.
So the strategy for many media enterprises is moving away from total system replacements toward improved connectivity between existing assets and cloud migration. “The goal would be not to rip and replace all the technology, but to derive interoperability and also kind of a cloud migration of the data so that you can work with that data in a much more unified way,” Tatta said.
Automating the manual grind
The industry is increasingly looking toward artificial intelligence not just for creative generation, but for the “plumbing” of ad operations to manage this complexity. Operative launched its AI platform, Adeline, in April 2024 to overlay existing systems and handle labor-intensive tasks like proposal generation and reporting.
“Those are real manual intensive efforts,” Tatta said regarding the traditional planning process. “And what Adeline does is basically automate that and incorporate a layer of decisioning that couldn’t take place.”
By crunching data that would traditionally take human teams hours to process, the technology aims to free up sellers to focus on strategy rather than spreadsheets. “Whether it’s plan generation, being able to generate an automated plan, we can do that in seconds what would normally take hours,” Tatta said.
Preparing for the 2026 inventory surge
Looking toward the horizon, 2026 looms as a high-pressure year for inventory management, driven by the FIFA World Cup and the U.S. midterm elections. That influx of premium, high-demand inventory requires precise forecasting to maximize yield without underselling or mispricing valuable slots.
“In the case of political, it’s a very short period of time,” Tatta said. “So a lot of our clients are looking at how do they optimize not only the sell-through of the inventory, but also the rates.”
Machine learning is being deployed to analyze historical data to predict pricing floors and demand spikes for these tentpole events. “When you layer in pricing on top of that, to understand what the price levels need to be based on future demand,” Tatta said. “I think in the near term, it puts a lot of pressure on planning and forecasting.”
You’re watching coverage from The Future of TV Advertising Global 2025. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
