Operative has officially launched Operative Compete, a SaaS platform for publishers to centrally manage all of their programmatic partners. Operative Compete works for display and video inventory and across header bidding and waterfall set-ups. A beta version of Operative Compete has been in use by Outdoor Channel, Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Nasdaq and Meredith Corporation.

Programmatic is becoming a bigger part of the advertising landscape, with eMarketer forecasting that $25.2 billion, or 73% of all U.S. display and video advertising will be transacted programmatically in 2016, rising to $37.9 billion, or 82% of spending, in 2018. eMarketer cites two reasons for the surge in programmatic: buyers’ and sellers’ increased comfort using automation and technology to transact, and increasing demand for audience-driven buying.

For publishers, managing and optimizing programmatic demand has become increasingly complicated. Ad budgets are currently diffused over multiple demand sources, which means that for publishers to tap into the broadest range of spending, numerous partnerships are required.

According to Operative’s own survey data, publishers often earn less than 10% of their digital ad revenue from programmatic, though they intend to aggressively ramp this up. As they do this, adding more partners and allocating more inventory to programmatic, complexity rises, making it challenging to evaluate results across demand sources. It also creates additional manual work to manage the inventory and these demand relationships, offsetting the intended savings of automation, one of programatic’s key benefits.

Operative Compete gives publishers the tools to compare key metrics including CPM and fill rate for different demand sources. Based on these insights, publishers can send updated instructions to their ad server in real time to maximize revenue. Operative Compete is positioned as a transparent, neutral platform for publishers that normalizes data from different demand partners to streamline decision-making.

Managing programmatic’s complexity and optimizing revenue will be among the important themes at our SHIFT // 2016 Programmatic Video & TV Advertising Summit on Wednesday, November 30th in NYC. Learn more and save with early bird tickets now.