This is part of Guardian News & Media’s mission to become a digital-first organization, one that places open journalism on the web at the heart of its strategy.
“As part of our mission to become a digital-first organization, we needed a revenue platform that could support both digital and print,” said Andy Beale, Technology Director, Guardian News & Media. “Our legacy systems were originally built for print only with digital systems often disconnected from the main order-to-fulfillment workflows, leading to expensive manual processing overheads. While we had considered building a system internally, we liked that Operative.One had best-practice functionality and capabilities built into the platform, enabling us to consolidate our print and digital business units, streamline our order to fulfillment process, and equip our sales organization with more innovative, cross-channel products.”
Operative.One will replace Guardian News & Media’s print-based legacy system and integrate with Salesforce.com, bringing together the critical business systems and processes that will enable this leading publisher to transform the way they do business, increase CPMs and maximize revenue opportunities. The organizations print and digital media businesses, including guardian.co.uk, as well as The Guardian and The Observer newspapers, will all be running from the same platform - Operative. One - in the first half of 2012. This will enable the media company to have one holistic view of their media business – from available inventory and campaign data to client invoicing and billing – giving them the ability to deliver more innovative, cross-channel products to the market, and to scale quicker in order to support future growth and expansion.
“We are excited to be working with Guardian News & Media as they pursue their mission of becoming a digital-first organization,” said Michael Leo, President and CEO of Operative. “Convergence is upon us, and we are seeing an increasing number of newspapers and magazines looking to consolidate and streamline their online and offline business operations in an effort to reduce transaction costs and create new revenue opportunities. Operative.One is the ideal solution for publishers looking to simplify their advertising business across channels, and across departments, so that they can scale quicker and speed the pace of innovation. We are thrilled that Guardian News & Media has selected Operative.One as their end-to-end solution for advertising business management.”
About Operative
Operative says: “Operative Media Inc. is the advertising business management company. Our core purpose is to allow the media and advertising industries to run increasingly complex businesses with simplicity. Operative’s next- generation, SaaS based platform and technology-enabled services help media industry leaders and their partners balance operational efficiency with innovation to reduce transaction costs and boost advertising revenue. Launched in October 2010, the Operative.One platform brings together the business processes and systems necessary to package, sell, traffic, manage, optimize and collect revenue on advertising products. More than 200 industry leaders rely on Operative to manage more than $6 billion in global ad revenue annually, including The Wall Street Journal, MSN, OMD, NBC Universal and National Public Media.”
