Marketers have fretted that linear television and digital video have operated in separate siloes, hampering their ability to run cross-platform campaigns efficiently. FreeWheel, an ad-tech unit of media and communications giant Comcast, is working to break down those barriers with self-service features introduced last week.
“We’re really looking at using our FreeWheel Strata technology in conjunction with our ad exposure data from some of the biggest publishers in the world to understand linear exposure,” Jonathan Whitticom, chief product officer at FreeWheel, said in this interview with Beet.TV, “and then being able to target on CTV or addressable to give you real incremental reach, and understanding frequency-capping across publishers and across channel.”
Applications for Political Campaigns
FreeWheel’s rollout of the new media-buying features coincides with an important period for this year’s midterm elections in the United States. Political campaigns are gearing up for primary contests and general races, and almost $8.8 billion will be spent on different forms of video advertising, according to one estimate.
Political TV buyers using FreeWheel’s Strata technology and curate and activate custom CTV audience segments using both first- and third-party data sets.
“Political agencies have always had a focus on data, and the way they’ve done their optimization techniques by using polling makes this a very interesting capability,” Whitticom said in the interview with Rob Williams, senior editor for Beet.TV. “They can take their existing linear campaigns and their schedules, ingest that into the tools, understand actual exposure at the household and people level, and then be able to construct CTV campaigns.”
Data-Driven Future
Advertisers are gaining new tools to improve their targeting of audiences while also protecting their valuable first-party information about information with clean rooms and federated data storage that keep it secure.
“When I look into the future, I see a bright world for television, and I see really data-driven, one-to one-television becoming one of the most important channels within advertising,” Whitticom said.
