Operative
Helping Media Companies Accelerate Growth

Even amidst the narrative of cord-cutting, affiliate and retransmission fee revenue still represents a significant portion of profitability for cable networks and broadcasters. However, the disparate and inefficient process of managing these revenues continues to adversely impact the overall revenue management accuracy for these companies. Multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) who pay affiliate and retransmission fees do not regularly report their monthly subscribers and billing entities, forcing media entities to make best-guess estimates on accruals each month. They also have to wait to reconcile individual billing payment line items for each MVPD. These struggles are indicative of the need for cable networks and broadcasters to overhaul manual affiliates and retransmission fee revenue management into an automated and auditable process to avoid unnecessary overhead, forecasting, and budgeting errors.

This is where Operative comes in.

For the last 20 years, Operative has been dedicated to accelerating the revenue growth of media agencies by providing them an open, data-driven and highly configurable architecture that works across all linear, digital and converged deals.

“Operative has systematically worked to rebuild the media market segment-by-segment. Every solution offered by the company has been developed in partnership with its clients to not only future-proof processes and systems but to also steer innovation in the industry. The depth of these relationships has yielded products that address each client’s pain points at each intersection on the journey—from buyer to seller,” says Glen Ceniza, Chief Technology Officer at Operative. In his three-year tenure at Operative, Ceniza has proven successful in building global technology teams and driving transformation from legacy to modern, efficient organizations. Today, Ceniza enables Operative to drive a culture of innovation, make a large-scale R&D operation and deliver a new generation sell-side platform to transform how advertising buyers and sellers interact.

Operative’s Medea Subscription platform helps clients save time with monthly billing activities and increases accuracy throughout the process. The platform automatically conducts payment and subscriber unification, simplifies invoice generation for thousands of billing line items across hundreds of MVPDs, provides email notifications of billing and collection and offers critical management reporting to all network services. The all-in-one platform electronically routes affiliate and retransmission fee contracts to all approvers to streamline the interdepartmental contract approval process, while eliminating human-induced errors. It also automates the signal authorization to ensure accurate billing and management of cable network receiver assets.

The audit and revenue concerns that resulted from the lack of automation made customers recognize the need for proper controls, processes, and data visibility

In one instance, a leading U.S.-based broadcast group had been manually managing affiliate and retransmission fee revenue, which led to a lack of visibility into their data and improper billing and revenue recognition. Additionally, the group had no reconciliation of their contracted fees with the amounts they were billing and experienced other struggles as a result of the manual process.

“This created audit and revenue concerns and customers also recognized the need to put proper controls, processes, and data visibility in place,” says Ceniza.

“The audit and revenue concerns that resulted from the lack of automation made customers recognize the need for proper controls, processes, and data visibility,” says Ceniza.

Medea allowed the broadcast group to identify errors in rate calculations and billing payment reconciliation, adopt and document best practices throughout the affiliate management process and manage the entire retransmission fee revenue process. The client correctly recognized their revenue and eliminated the cost of outsourcing a team for manual processing. The Medea Subscription platform has similarly enabled other additional media companies to streamline their business operations.

Bolstered by many such client success stories, Operative has emerged as the partner of choice for over 300 of the world’s top media brands. Moving forward, the company will launch the Advertising Operating System (AOS)—a cloud-native platform that provides the power of an open, highly configurable, and easy-to-integrate ad management system. AOS will allow users to plan linear, digital, advanced television, cross-media, and converged deals on a single platform and product catalog.

“Over time, Medea will leverage the AOS micro services-based platform for future enhancements, such as expanded forecasting analytics and reporting,” Glen concludes.