Mediaocean is Unifying All of Its Products Under a Single Platform

Mediaocean, a ubiquitous software provider within the advertising industry, is consolidating its product suite of disparate platforms into one core offering that covers media planning, workflow and accounting. Underpinning these unified products is a new omnichannel-data warehouse, which centralizes data gathered from various sources including publishers, social media platforms, data providers and demand-side platforms in order to help marketers more easily compare campaign performance or business outcomes across different channels. Mediaocean’s suite of 10 products manages more than $150 billion in global media spend. Its specific platforms help clients manage campaigns in areas like linear TV and social media, but their separate nature has made cross-channel reporting and analytics a challenge for users. Bill Wise, CEO of Mediaocean, said creating a unified product stack will help clients overcome this hurdle, a must as marketers look to target audiences across a quickly changing media landscape. “The world wants to go to omnichannel. Audiences are fragmented across devices and media screens, but a lot of organizations aren't set up that way today,” said Wise. Mediaocean launched this unified platform in China last year. It should be fully rolled out in the U.S. by the end of 2021 and in the EMEA market the following year. Wise said the company invested an extra $10 million in 2021 to support this launch (on top of the $100 million Mediaocean invests internally into infrastructure and research and development). The 54-year-old company, whose client roster includes WPP, Microsoft and General Motors, is revamping its product suite as the fundamentals of trading media and planning campaigns drastically change. The decline of linear TV tied with the emergence of streaming, the rapid growth of ecommerce and proliferation of social media have forced marketers to change how they plan and optimize campaigns to make sure their ad buys are as efficient and easy to manage as possible. Mediaocean bought 4C last July as part of its effort to create an omnichannel platform where marketers can track and compare campaigns regardless of where they run. 4C’s legacy platform, Scope, is now turning into media management solution for walled gardens like Facebook and Amazon. While Mediaocean is the established media planning, billing and reconciliation platform, it’s also seeing competition from the likes of FreeWheel’s Strata offering and Hudson MX, a fast-growing startup founded in 2016 by former Mediaocean executive JT Batson. But Mediaocean heavily benefits from its incumbent status, given the massive disruption clients would face when switching to a new software. “People don't leave Mediaocean,” said Wise. “When we process $150 billion of spend, and we have to reconcile that to the penny and do significant audits around our systems, that's like 10s and 10s of millions of dollars of infrastructure that startups, frankly, just can't get to.”

Programmatic

Mediaocean is Unifying All of Its Products Under a Single Platform

The prolific legacy software is getting a modern look

Andrew Blustein

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Andrew Blustein