Warner Bros. Discovery's advertising sales arm will wire its ad technology into Prisma Direct, the automated channel Mediaocean built for direct deals between agencies and premium video owners, Mediaocean said today in New York. The first connection runs to Neo, the self-service buying platform WBD opened in 2025, while a fuller link covering every stage of a transaction is promised for later, with no date attached.

In Short

Mediaocean makes software that big ad agencies use to order and pay for advertising, and today it said Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of HBO Max, CNN and TNT, will plug its ad-selling system into a Mediaocean tool called Prisma Direct. That matters to anyone buying TV and streaming ads directly from a large media company, because those deals still move through emails, PDFs and retyped orders that the tool is designed to replace. The first step is a link to Neo, WBD's own do-it-yourself ad-buying platform, with a fuller connection promised later and no dates given. Paramount is partway through buying WBD, and nothing in the announcement says what becomes of the link if that deal closes.

What Mediaocean set out

Prisma is software that agencies and advertisers use as their book of record: what media was bought, from whom, at what price, and what was eventually invoiced and paid. Prisma Direct, a workflow inside it, connects that record to the order systems of the companies selling the airtime. According to Mediaocean, Warner Bros. Discovery Advertising will join that arrangement, connecting Prisma Direct with WBD's ad tech system so that buyer and seller workflows meet without the manual processes that have long complicated direct media transactions.

The rollout comes in two stages. The first is an initial connection to Neo, which Mediaocean describes as WBD's proprietary self-service buying platform and dates to 2025. The second, according to the release, will be "a more robust connection supporting the full scope of transactions." Mediaocean frames the aim as technology that removes operational friction "while preserving the value, flexibility, and transparency of direct buyer and media owner relationships."

Drew Kane, Chief Product Officer at Prisma, was the only executive quoted. "Premium media represent some of the most valuable inventory in advertising, yet buying it still relies on too many manual, fragmented workflows," Kane said, according to the release. "Prisma Direct is changing that by creating direct, automated connections between the systems agencies already use to manage media and the publishers they want to buy from. Bringing Warner Bros. Discovery into the Prisma Direct ecosystem is another important step toward making this a scalable industry model."

The product itself covers five stages of a deal, according to Mediaocean: ordering, trafficking, campaign analytics, billing and reconciliation. The company says these system-to-system connections reduce operational cost and complexity while improving speed, accuracy and transparency. Scale is the pitch. More than 100,000 people use Prisma, and over $200 billion in annualized ad spend runs through Mediaocean's platforms, according to the company. Neither figure has been independently audited, and neither describes Prisma Direct specifically, which is a much younger product sitting inside that installed base. Mediaocean also owns Innovid, the ad serving and measurement platform, and Protected, its verification and brand safety product, and markets an AI layer called NIVO AI across the stack.

What the release leaves out

Several things are missing, and some of them matter.

No one from Warner Bros. Discovery is quoted. The statement was distributed by Mediaocean alone. That is a departure from the pattern set in March, when Disney's first-partner announcement carried a statement from Jamie Power, senior vice president of addressable sales at Disney Advertising, and spelled out the brands covered: ABC, ABC News, Disney+, Disney Channels Worldwide, ESPN Networks, ESPN+, Freeform, Fubo, FX, National Geographic, Hulu and eight ABC-owned local stations. Today's release lists no WBD networks or streaming services. It refers only to a premium portfolio.

There are no dates. Neither the Neo connection nor the deeper integration carries a go-live month, a quarter or a year.

There is no price. When Prisma Direct was unveiled on March 31, Mediaocean promised reduced tech fees and fewer intermediaries for buyers and higher net revenue for publishers. Neither announcement says what Mediaocean charges, or which side pays.

The timing language has also shifted. In March, Prisma Direct was slated to go live in the third quarter of 2026. Today's release refers to Prisma Direct in the past tense, as a product that started earlier this year. The third quarter ends today. Whether any Disney order has yet moved end to end through the product, the release does not say.

And the acquisition that will decide who owns WBD's ad business goes unmentioned.

How a direct TV deal moves now

Most premium television and streaming inventory at companies such as Warner Bros. Discovery is still sold direct, meaning a negotiated deal between an agency and the media company rather than an auction. The mechanics have changed little in two decades. An agency issues a request for proposal; the seller returns a plan and pricing; an insertion order is signed. The order details are then keyed into the seller's order system and, separately, into the buyer's system of record. A trafficker on each side configures delivery. Once the flight runs, the seller's delivery report is set against the buyer's, and invoices are matched to orders.

Each of those handoffs is a place where data gets retyped. PPC Land's account of the March debut catalogued the artefacts involved: spreadsheets, PDFs, rekeyed insertion orders, offline trafficking sheets and disconnected financial reconciliation processes.

Reconciliation is where the money leaks. Buyer and seller rarely count the same impressions. The IAB's modular contract framework, released for comment in February 2026, asks the parties to name a controlling measurement in each order and sets a 10% threshold above which good-faith reconciliation begins when the controlling count is lower. Those rules settle disputes after the fact. A system-to-system link is meant to reduce how often the disputes arise.

Not programmatic, by design

The industry's earlier answer to this problem was programmatic guaranteed, which fixes price and volume in advance and then executes through the same demand-side platform, supply-side platform and ad server that carry auction traffic. Google, when it brought out its version in June 2015, claimed the workflow could fall from 40 steps to four. That figure came from the vendor, and no independent audit of it has been published.

Prisma Direct takes a different route. It does not convert a direct deal into a programmatic one. It connects the buyer's system of record to the seller's order systems through APIs, which Mediaocean described in March as trusted endpoints on both sides. Disney's connection was built on the same technology that powers Disney Campaign Manager, the company's own buying interface. WBD's first connection follows the same logic, running to the seller's own self-service tool.

Prisma has done versions of this before. In December 2024, Microsoft Advertising connected to Prisma for automated order insertion, with approval times cut to minutes and no need for buyers to manage separate logins or PDF documents; buyers first had to map their Prisma instance to their Microsoft Advertising account. Earlier that year, Mediaocean and Magnite linked Prisma to ClearLine, giving Prisma users direct access to premium video sellers through Magnite's execution layer. Prisma Direct differs in that each connection is made to a media company's own buying systems, rather than to a supply-side platform acting for many sellers at once.

Where Neo sits

Warner Bros. Discovery unveiled the platform at its upfront presentation on May 14, 2025, styling it NEO at the time. According to WBD's announcement, it was designed to give buyers direct access to the company's premium video inventory across streaming, linear, FAST and syndication through a single interface, with advertisers setting budgets, pacing and optimization goals themselves. WBD built it with FreeWheel and Magnite. At the same event it unveiled DemoDirect, a tool for demographic-based buying across its linear networks.

That scope matters. Prisma Direct was framed in March around streaming, video and connected TV. If Neo retains the reach WBD described in 2025, a Prisma connection to it would extend beyond streaming into linear inventory. The release does not specify which inventory types the connection will carry.

A second question follows from Neo's design. A self-service platform exists so that buyers can log in and transact on their own. Connecting it to Prisma raises the matter of whether agency teams will still need separate Neo credentials, or whether orders will originate in Prisma and pass through. The Microsoft precedent removed the separate login. Today's release is silent on the point.

The rebuild underneath

Warner Bros. Discovery is mid-way through replacing the ad technology that Prisma will connect to. On July 8, WBD and Amazon Web Services set out an agentic advertising platform meant to end the separation between its linear and digital ad businesses, which had run separate systems for planning and buying. Six AWS services were named: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for the agents, Amazon Bedrock for foundation models, Amazon SageMaker for custom models, Amazon S3 holding data in the Apache Iceberg format, Amazon ECS for hosting, and Amazon Quick as an assistant for sales teams. Unified media planning was scheduled for the third quarter of 2026. Composable order management, pricing and stewardship were scheduled for the fourth.

The fourth quarter begins tomorrow. Order management is the layer that would receive orders from an external system at scale, which makes it the natural counterpart to the "full scope of transactions" Mediaocean promises. The release does not link the two, and it does not say whether the deeper Prisma connection depends on WBD finishing that work.

Nor is Prisma Direct WBD's only automated route to buyers. The company was one of ten founding partners when Comcast unveiled Universal Ads in January 2025, a cross-publisher platform with a self-service tool offered at no cost. In June 2026 WBD was named an early participant in Amazon's Outcome Optimizer, which applies Amazon shopping, browsing and streaming signals to programmatic guaranteed deals inside FreeWheel's ad server; Amazon reported a 33% lift in on-target reach in testing, a figure from the vendor. And in July 2025, WBD signed a multi-year measurement agreement with VideoAmp built around StreamX, its converged planning platform.

The balance between those routes moved during the 2026 upfront. Reporting gathered during upfront week had more than half of WBD's biddable inventory demand arriving through upfront commitments, with private marketplace deals gaining share over programmatic guaranteed, and Jill Steinhauser of WBD expecting some agentic buys in that same cycle. Prisma Direct opens no new sales channel against that backdrop. It changes the paperwork path of the direct deals that remain.

An owner in waiting

Everything above is being built for a company whose ownership is about to change. Paramount Skydance agreed on February 27 to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $31 a share in cash. WBD shareholders approved the sale on April 23, the Justice Department cleared it on June 12, and the European Commission approved it on July 22 on condition that Paramount leave the UIP film distribution venture within 13 months. Twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America settled their challenges on September 21. Yet in a filing on September 25, Paramount said the timing of the closing was not yet certain.

Money now rides on the delay. WBD shareholders are owed a ticking fee of $0.25 per share for each quarter the deal remains open after today. Mediaocean's release lands on the last day before that clock starts. Until closing, the two companies sell advertising separately: a July 24 stipulation barred them from integrating operations, according to Paramount's quarterly filing.

What happens to a Prisma connection built for Neo once the owner changes? Paramount runs its own self-service buying tool, Paramount Ads Manager, and has said it will combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single service of roughly 200 million subscribers. It has also consolidated its ad technology and product teams into five divisions under a newly hired executive vice president, a reorganisation that reporting at the time framed partly as insurance against regulatory delay affecting access to Warner's NEO platform. Paramount has not been named as a Prisma Direct partner. The European decision imposed no conditions on advertising, leaving the combined ad portfolio intact. By EMARKETER's estimate, HBO Max alone captures about 1.5% of US connected TV ad spending, and a merged portfolio would account for more than 5%.

The answer, for now, sits outside anything Mediaocean has published.

Mediaocean's year of connections

Today's announcement is the latest in a run of integrations that have made Prisma the point where more of the transaction meets. The groundwork predates Prisma Direct: Mediaocean agreed to buy Innovid for about $500 million in November 2024 and merged it with Flashtalking. Then came 2026:

The commercial logic appears in Mediaocean's own research, though it is research a vendor commissioned. Its H1 2026 survey of 320 marketers found 56% naming fragmentation across platforms and publishers as their largest concern, and only 10% reporting fully unified ad tech systems.

Competitors are pursuing the same position from the other side. This month Comscore placed its television currency data inside datafuelX, a seller-side forecasting and posting system, a move PPC Land read as a contest over measurement moving into workflow software: Nielsen had gone where buyers plan and reconcile, and Comscore where sellers forecast and post.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For agencies, direct television buying is where the manual work concentrates, and Prisma Direct now names two sellers. Every seller that connects removes a set of rekeying steps from every agency on Prisma that buys from it. Every seller that does not keeps the old paperwork in place. After six months the list stands at Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, and only Disney's inventory has been itemised in public.

For media owners, the question is who sits at the order intake. Prisma is run by an independent software company rather than by a seller, which distinguishes it from routes owned by media groups. PPC Land made the point about Universal Ads in August, noting that a platform carrying inventory from A+E, Fox, Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery alongside NBCUniversal is better placed if no single one of them owns it. Independence cuts the other way too. With planning partners, audience currencies, AI agents and now direct seller connections all wired into one company's system, more of the transaction depends on a single vendor whose fees for the direct product remain undisclosed.

For finance teams, reconciliation is the stage where these integrations either prove themselves or do not. The release does not say whose delivery count Prisma Direct uses when buyer and seller numbers diverge, whether WBD's, Innovid's or a third party's, or how that interacts with the controlling-measurement clauses the IAB published this year.

And for everyone buying Warner Bros. Discovery inventory into 2027, the integration is being built on two moving foundations at once: a seller-side platform WBD is still replacing, and a corporate owner that has not yet taken control. Will a connection built to Neo in the autumn still point at Neo a year from now? Nothing published today settles it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Mediaocean, through its Prisma platform and Prisma Direct workflow, and Warner Bros. Discovery Advertising, the ad sales arm of Warner Bros. Discovery. Drew Kane, Chief Product Officer at Prisma, is the only executive quoted; no WBD spokesperson is named. Paramount Skydance, which has agreed to acquire WBD, is not mentioned in the release.

What: Warner Bros. Discovery Advertising will integrate its ad technology with Prisma Direct, starting with an initial connection to Neo, its self-service buying platform opened in 2025, and later extending to a connection covering the full scope of direct transactions: ordering, trafficking, campaign analytics, billing and reconciliation. No dates, fees or inventory lists were disclosed.

When: Made public today at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, six months after Disney became the first media company named for Prisma Direct and on the last day of the quarter in which Prisma Direct was slated to go live. WBD's own order management rollout is scheduled for the fourth quarter.

Where: New York, where both companies are based. The release does not specify markets; Neo and WBD's converged ad platform were both presented as covering WBD's US advertising business.

Why: Direct deals for premium television and streaming inventory still rely on spreadsheets, PDFs and rekeyed insertion orders, and Mediaocean is building API links between agencies' system of record and each media company's order systems to remove those handoffs. For WBD, the link adds an agency-side route into a platform it is rebuilding, at a moment when the company's ownership has not yet passed to Paramount.