SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – This year’s midterm elections are estimated to generate as much as $9 billion in video advertising revenue as campaigns seek to reach voters on linear TV and connected TV (CTV). To meet their demands for ad inventories, ad-platform provider FreeWheel today released new tools to unify audience-based planning on premium CTV with deduplicated reach on linear TV.
“It will enable a political advertiser to curate their audiences, ingest their linear schedule, build out an incremental reach-based buy and activate that across Comcast supply acquired from our marketplace,” Tess O’Brien, vice president of demand enterprise sales at FreeWheel, a unit of Comcast, said in this #BeetRetreat interview. “For FreeWheel, this is also a huge moment. This is the culmination of everything that we’ve been working towards the last couple of years.”
Prioritizing Cross-Platform Reach
Political campaigns are among the advertisers that face the challenge of reaching broad groups of consumers efficiently as people divide their time among linear television and CTV apps, each of which is a “walled garden” of video streams. Converging these disparate channels has become a bigger priority for media buyers and ad-tech companies.
“When we speak to our agency partners about what they’re looking for, we’re hearing a lot of interest in convergence,” O’Brien said to interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, founder and CEO of Furious Corp.
Media agencies want incremental reach among CTV viewers who don’t spend much time with linear TV. They also want to reach target audiences and to manage cross-platform campaigns, O’Brien said. Achieving the goals requires a common set of industry standards for measurement and setting the value of ad transactions.
“There’s a lot of conversation around new currencies in the market,” O’Brien said, “but from a FreeWheel perspective, we also really think that we need to be focused on the concept of standardization. It’s going to be more important than ever that we are working across a shared set of metrics and a shared infrastructure for TV overall.”
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