Mediaocean: Legacy Software, Now with Bain-Flavoring

It’s still slow, still siloed — but now it comes with private equity seasoning and a new org chart.

Pesach Lattin (ADOTAT)
July 17, 2025

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In which we politely ask whether a "promotion" is actually just a well-catered exile—and why Mediaocean looks less like a system of record and more like a record stuck on repeat.

The Emperor’s New Title

You’ve probably already seen the announcement.
Ramsey McGrory—dealmaker, platform-builder, longtime M&A whisperer—has a shiny new title.

President of Prisma.

Cue the applause. Cue the photo op. Cue the LinkedIn congratulations from 47 people who have no idea what Prisma actually is but are just happy to smash that “Support” button.

But if you’ve been around this industry long enough, you know that job titles in adtech can be a bit like Times Square Rolexes—flashy, expensive-looking, and occasionally running backwards.

Because when someone who was the Chief Development Officer of a company—the guy overseeing massive acquisitions like 4C, Flashtalking, Innovid, and more—is suddenly placed in charge of a single product line, it’s worth asking: is this really a promotion… or is this just what corporate redirection looks like when you’ve got good PR?

As one insider put it, “Being President of Prisma at Mediaocean is a bit like being named Head Chef of a microwave.”

There’s heat.

There’s machinery.

But no one’s asking you to reinvent the menu.

🧭 We’re Not Here to Attack. We’re Here to Read the Fine Print.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about dunking on Ramsey—by all accounts, he’s one of my personal favorites and he’s a sharp, respected leader with a solid track record and a list of friends a mile long.

Nor is it about dragging Mediaocean for sport.

That’s not what we do here.

Our job isn’t to repeat press releases. It’s to look past them.

Everyone else is going to rehash the safe version of the story, full of corporate synergy and bold new chapters.

But we ask: what’s between the lines?

What’s unsaid?

What’s being quietly rearranged behind the scenes while everyone’s clapping in the front row?

And this move? It speaks volumes.

🧩 The Optics: Strategic Focus or Strategic Sideline?

There’s a script that gets handed out when moves like this happen. It’s full of phrases like “doubling down,” “laser focus,” “evolving needs,” and “platform expansion.”

But anyone who’s played this game knows the subtext.

This wasn’t just a title change—it was a scope reduction dressed up as a leadership opportunity. A guy whose previous remit spanned entire corporate acquisitions and growth strategy is now confined to running a single (albeit important) product platform.

Let’s be real: If Mediaocean’s leadership wanted Ramsey front and center in the next act of growth, he’d be Chief Strategy Officer. Or President of Global Platforms. Or EVP of Transformation.

Instead, he’s now in charge of the part of the platform most users associate with error messages, manual workarounds, and the fine art of screaming at a locked record warning while rekeying media plans into Excel.

This isn’t a new chapter. It’s the IT department’s version of witness protection.

🧱 Mediaocean’s Bind: Indispensable… and Unusable

And that brings us to the real issue—one that has nothing to do with Ramsey personally and everything to do with the company he now represents, in miniature.

Mediaocean is both too big to fail and too old to function without a little help.

It’s indispensable: There’s no denying that. Over $200 billion in annual media spend flows through its pipes. It is the plumbing. It is the billing. It is the record-keeping system that powers agency workflows at every major holding company.
It’s also often seems unusable: The UI feels like it was last refreshed when MySpace was peaking. Campaign planning tools are so underwhelming that agencies revert to Excel like it’s 2007. Workflows are brittle. Support feels outsourced to an answering machine with passive-aggressive tendencies.

In short: you can’t live with it.

But you also can’t live without it.

So what do agencies do?

They bolt things on. Build internal dashboards. Duct-tape together a workaround stack.

Then cross their fingers and hope Daisy Support doesn’t ghost them before QBR season.

🔍 So, What Does This Shift Really Signal?

It’s not about Ramsey.

It’s about what Mediaocean values right now—and what it fears the most.

Fear of churn: Buyers are questioning the cost, the value, the locked-in nature of these contracts.
Fear of irrelevance: While companies like Basis Technologies race ahead with unified planning, real-time analytics, and cloud-native design, Mediaocean is still consolidating tools it bought half a decade ago.
Fear of scrutiny: The “system of record” label was once a badge of trust. Now, it’s a warning label: “May contain outdated architecture and passive-aggressive error messages.”

🧠 Coming Up Next in This Series:

This wasn’t just a leadership shuffle. It was the canary in the adtech mine shaft. And in the next four parts, we’ll explore what it really means for Mediaocean—and the agencies trying desperately to build their way out of it.

Part II: The Workflow That Time Forgot
Why media buyers are still toggling between five tools, three spreadsheets, and one broken export button.
Part III: DIY Revolution
How agencies are quietly building internal tools to do what Prisma promised—only faster, cheaper, and with less screaming.
Part IV: The Basis Rebellion
Why Basis Technologies is becoming the platform of choice for buyers tired of asking permission to innovate.
Part V: The Future of the Plumbing
Can Mediaocean modernize before its own clients outgrow it—or are we witnessing the long, slow fade of adtech’s most reluctant gatekeeper?

So yes, Ramsey got a promotion.

But if that promotion involves managing a legacy product with a reputation for slow support, Excel dependencies, and haunted dropdown menus, one has to ask:

Was this really the next big thing—or just a very polite way of saying, “Here, you fix it?”

Stay tuned.

🧠 Stay bold, stay curious, and know more than you did yesterday.

Editor, ADOTAT

Too Big to Pivot, Too Slow to Matter
Mediaocean still powers billions in ad spend. But at what cost — and whose sanity?

Mediaocean was once the digital equivalent of plumbing. Invisible, essential, and only noticed when it broke. It handled the stuff no one wanted to touch — billing, reconciliation, buying, planning — for the biggest agencies in the world. And for a while, that worked.

But we’re not in the 90s anymore.

Today, when agencies are expected to turn on a dime, connect the dots across omnichannel, and report in near-real time, Mediaocean’s legacy feels less like plumbing and more like ballast — weighing everyone down just when they need to be moving fastest.

Let’s unpack the real experience of working inside this stack. Spoiler: it’s not pretty.

🧱 Prisma: Still Held Together With Excel and Prayer

Mediaocean markets Prisma as an end-to-end omnichannel buying tool. The reality? It’s where modern media plans go to die — and then get retyped. By hand.

Agencies don’t plan in Prisma it seems. They plan in Excel. Because according to one planner: “The UI is a disaster. I literally had to rekey the same budget into three different places. I asked if there was an import function — they laughed.”

Reconciliation? Still semi-manual. Buyers pull data from DSPs, match it to invoices, and hope nothing changed mid-flight. “Even when it’s supposed to be automated, we have to fix half the matches by hand. We’re spending time clicking through errors instead of managing campaigns.”

Even buying isn’t seamless. Prisma integrates with DSPs — but those integrations are brittle.

📉 The Automation Mirage

Mediaocean promises automation. But in the same way that a fax machine once promised “digital communication.”

One user mentioned: “I still enter every budget manually. One by one. For each line item. For each month. How is that not something they’ve fixed?”

Another planner was blunter: “It’s not terrible once you memorize all the quirks — but for new planners? It’s a straight-up hazing ritual.”

🔒 Locked Down, Slowed Down

Once a deal is approved in Prisma, it’s locked. Changing it means filing a support ticket, waiting for the internal Daisy system to respond (assuming it doesn’t crash), and hoping someone at Mediaocean has the right admin access to tweak a decimal.

A buyer vented: “I spent three days waiting to change one field because the record was locked. By the time support fixed it, the campaign had ended.”

And as for those dashboards? They're real — but the data lag isn't.

“By the time the dashboard loads, my team’s already reforecasted in Google Sheets.”

📊 Mediaocean’s Value Prop vs. User Reality

Mediaocean Promise	Real-World User Feedback
End-to-End Workflow	“We still use Excel for everything. Prisma just slows us down.”
Automation	“Automation? Where? I manually enter data for hours a week.”
Real-Time Optimization	“Optimizations take 2 days and a support ticket.”
24/7 Support	“Daisy crashes. Then we wait three days for a reply.”

Is Bill Wise Actually Outdated?

Let’s clear something up. Bill Wise isn’t some relic muttering about XML over brunch. He’s been around the block — from DoubleClick to Right Media to Yahoo. He’s smart, strategic, and has weathered enough industry shifts to qualify for adtech survivor benefits.

But Mediaocean isn’t moving fast enough. And that’s the problem.

Wise has admitted the company has struggled to keep up. In a recent interview, he said, “We fell behind the market at times, especially as the pace of digital innovation sped up.”

He’s also claimed they’re making changes, hiring consultants, rethinking workflows. “We brought in Bain to help rethink processes,” he said. “We know we have legacy issues.”

And yet? Users keep telling us the same story: manual entry, locked fields, error-prone reconciliation, ticket fatigue.

One media exec put it plainly: “Bill’s not the issue. The stack is.”

💬 Final Word

To be clear: we’re not here to attack companies.

That’s lazy journalism.

We’re here to look past the press releases.

Because let’s be honest — plenty of publications will happily repeat Mediaocean’s line about “streamlined, automated, end-to-end solutions.”

That’s not our job.

Our job is to ask: what’s actually happening inside the platform?

And what we’re hearing — again and again — is this:

It has to finally fix the stack.

SIDEBAR: When Bain Walks In, The Clock Starts Ticking

Let’s stop pretending this is about "efficiency."

Bringing Bain into Mediaocean isn’t a reorg — it’s a reset.

Bain doesn’t do nips and tucks.

They do controlled demolitions with nice lighting.

And when they show up, there are only two outcomes:

Option 1: Carve It Up and Sell It Off

This is Bain’s favorite game. It’s not a refresh. It’s strategic dismemberment.

They’ve literally written the playbook: In Bain’s 2025 Private Equity report, they show carve-outs still return 2.5x+ when done right — especially when the asset gets a standalone launch and immediate Day One restructuring.

This is textbook:

Prisma gets spun out into a "modern media workflow engine" (translation: same UI, new narrative).
Protected becomes the verification layer someone else has to fix.
Billing and finance ops get sold as a “media fintech core” to some VC-backed startup who thinks it's Stripe-for-TV.

Who buys?
Private equity scavengers love a distressed B2B asset with locked-in revenue and unhappy clients. Just ask Clearwater, Umbrex, or the ghost of Masland Carpets — a Bain case study that returned 7x and ended in layoffs and liquidation.

Nothing says “value creation” like closing the office and cashing the check.

Option 2: Polish It, Package It, Pitch It

If you’re not selling the limbs, maybe you’re dressing up the whole body.

Here’s how Bain handles a legacy enterprise play that’s just slow, not dead:

Cut staff. Boost EBITDA. Let’s not pretend the reorg isn’t step one.
Simplify the org chart. That’s what the “Ramsey is just Prisma now” story is really about: narrative control.
Rebrand everything. Make it sparkle with Gartner logos, category creation phrases, and flowcharts labeled “AI-powered convergence.”

Seen it before?

Toshiba Memory: Bain carved it out, rewired ops, flipped it.
Fuji Soft: Bain went toe-to-toe with KKR because even dusty IT firms can shine when PE thinks it smells profit.

Key Takeaways:

Scenario	What Bain Did	What It Could Mean for Mediaocean
Carve-Out	Spin and sell business units	Prisma, Innovid, Protected split off — IPOs or strategic sales
Turnaround	Slash costs, redefine roadmap	Layoffs, leaner ops, Finance-core focus
Asset Strip	Sell modules, keep contract revenue	Legacy tools sold, ERP skeleton remains
Rebrand for Sale	Tidy P&L, repitch for acquisition	Clean decks, clear mission, sellable structure

Final Word: This Is a Fuse, Not a Fix

Bain didn’t come to improve Figma tickets.
They came because someone’s ready to exit — whether in chunks or one big bow-wrapped package.

For Mediaocean, this is not “maybe someday.”
This is: what stays, what sells, and who’s still standing when the dust settles.

Legacy tech may be hard to kill — but Bain isn’t in the resurrection business.
They’re here to make the numbers work. Even if the product doesn’t.

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Mediaocean: Legacy Software, Now with Bain-Flavoring

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