Connected, Contextual, and Premium: A Q&A with FreeWheel on Smarter Streaming Strategies
In a streaming-first world, advertisers are challenged to deliver premium experiences at scale, without losing control over placement, context, or audience relevance. That’s where FreeWheel comes in. As a global technology platform purpose-built for TV advertising, FreeWheel simplifies the complex streaming landscape through direct connections, identity-powered precision, and premium video environments that viewers trust.
We sat down with Eric Linder, Director of Growth and New Business at FreeWheel, to unpack how their platform enables advertisers to cut through fragmentation, enhance relevance, and drive measurable outcomes in the connected TV space. Let’s dive into the details.
Powering the Future of TV Advertising
Q: Can you provide a brief overview of your company and how you support advertisers?
FreeWheel is a global technology platform built for the TV advertising industry with a simple mission: Making Streaming Advertising Easy.
FreeWheel empowers all segments of the new TV ecosystem including the technology, data enablement, and convergent marketplaces required for buyers and sellers to transact across all screens and channels. Ultimately, we want to enable the simplest, most direct connection between buyers and sellers so we can deliver the best results for everyone.
Maintaining Brand Trust Through Quality and Vigilance
Q: What brand safety and quality standards do you maintain for your inventory?
Given our set of inventory partners, we are already in a great position to ensure brand safety and quality because of the premium video content available from our publishers.
We work closely with our partners to ensure that they can expect the highest level of brand safety against all forms of ad fraud. This starts at the beginning of every partnership with onbooard reviews followed by continuous daily and weekly monitoring of our platform and clients.
In addition, we partner with leading vendors HUMAN, MOAT, TAG and Pixalate to not only monitor fraud but actively remove it. Not only do we filter and block IVT before it reaches the marketplace, we also routinely identify segments of inventory that are often blocked and work to permanently remove them from our ecosystem.
We are continuously expanding and updating our safety and quality solutions in order to ensure a premium marketplace.
What “Premium” Means in Today’s Streaming Ecosystem
Q: What criteria is used to define your inventory as premium or high-quality?
To qualify as premium, video content should be
- Delivered transparently
- Brand safe
- Seen by real people
In addition, one of the best ways to maintain high inventory standards is by streamlining the supply chain and providing the most direct path to supply so that advertisers have a transparent understanding of where their ads are appearing.
We’ve also conducted research through the FreeWheel Viewer Experience Lab to understand what viewers consider premium and how that drives outcomes for brands. One study showed that platform, content, device, and ad load are all leading factors for inventory to be considered premium.
Brands shown in these premium video environments increased brand perception and credibility. For example, viewers were nearly 60% more likely to recall ads in premium environments and 62% more likely to conduct research on them.
Activating Audiences at Scale with Real-Time Intelligence
Q: What insights are you able to surface for advertisers to use to help them better understand their audiences?
FreeWheel has one of the industry’s largest audience marketplaces with over 150,000 readily available audience segments. With real-time audience reach and frequency across platforms and devices, publishers can activate an addressable campaign quickly so advertisers can scale faster and see results on their target audiences sooner.
The audience marketplace includes a built-in identity graph, enabling advertisers to better understand, connect with, and expand their target audiences. This level of precision allows buyers to track not only which individuals, households, or devices received their advertising and how frequently but also whether they took any action.
Turning Insights into Actionable Targeting
Q: How do these audience insights help advertisers reach more effectively?
Via the FreeWheel Identity Network, identity graphs can power high-quality match rates so brands can deterministically identify and connect consumers across devices, enable better planning and forecasting, manage reach and frequency as well as attribute outcomes to specific exposure events.
The audience marketplace includes a built-in identity graph, enabling advertisers to better understand, connect with, and expand their target audiences. This level of information allows buyers to see exactly how effective their campaigns were.
Reaching Diverse and Hard-to-Find Viewers at Scale
Q: How do your audience insights help advertisers reach diverse, unique, or hard-to-reach audiences?
One of the best ways to help advertisers diversify their audience reach in an efficient and effective way is by tapping into the power of addressable TV.
When buyers target an addressable TV audience, what they’re really doing is targeting a group of households that includes the audiences they want to reach. By investing in their own first-party data, publishers can combat signal loss and strengthen their audience strategy which enables more efficient incremental reach and higher target audience penetration.
Given the unique audience insights FreeWheel has access to, advertisers can reach specific audiences at scale across premium content. By leveraging Comcast’s insights, we can provide unparalleled visibility into viewing trends.
We then transform these proprietary insights into multi-publisher inventory bundles, which is key in a fragmented ecosystem.
Precision Timing Through Contextual and Identity Signals
Q: How do you enable advertisers to reach relevant audiences within the right timeline?
At the end of last year, we launched the FreeWheel Contextual Marketplace, that enables publishers to share precise, contextual classification insights within streaming inventory so advertisers can enhance their media campaigns. Research shows that viewers are twice as engaged when the ads are relevant, so by pairing contextual signals with our other precision tools, advertisers can deliver more personal, relevant brand experiences in the right setting.
Built for TV: A Streamlined Supply Path That Works
Q: Is there anything unique about your approach to supply path optimization (SPO) that advertisers should know?
Since FreeWheel is the ad management platform for more than 80% of premium publishers and distributors globally, we are in a unique position to solve issues related to a bloated media supply chain. In addition, our SSP is built natively into the ad server, bringing advertisers as close to the sun as possible in terms of inventory access.
With this architecture in place, FreeWheel is better equipped to handle live streaming events and capitalize on TV’s biggest moments programmatically.
By providing buyers with a direct connection to FreeWheel publisher’s inventory, through our own technology and other buying platforms, we can scale efficiently, process ad decisions at lightning speed, eliminate unnecessary tech taxes, and increases working media for advertisers. And importantly, we are putting control back in the right hands – publishers and advertisers.
Want to learn more about why going direct matters? Check out this blog post by Digilant’s VP of Solutions, Kyle Malone: Why Going Direct Is Best. In it, Kyle breaks down how Digilant vets its tech partners—including FreeWheel—to simplify the supply chain and deliver results with confidence.
Collaborating for Smarter, More Effective TV Advertising
At Digilant, we’re committed to working with SSP partners who simplify complexity without compromising on quality or control. FreeWheel’s focus on direct integrations, identity-backed targeting, and premium video inventory makes them a valuable partner in the ever-evolving world of streaming.
By helping advertisers break through fragmentation and connect with viewers in meaningful, measurable ways, FreeWheel exemplifies what it means to create smarter streaming strategies.
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