FreeWheel, the advertising technology unit of Comcast, this month announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with audience data and measurement company Samba TV to offer major improvements in reaching targeted groups of viewers. Their collaboration is especially significant as political campaigns seek to reach independent and undecided voters in swing states and districts.
“We are very excited about the FreeWheel and Samba TV partnership,” Eric Davis, head of independent and political, programmatic demand at Comcast’s FreeWheel, said in this interview with Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV. “This is going to help advertisers maximize their reach, optimize their frequency and refine their targeting.”
As a result their partnership, Samba TV’s standard and custom audience segments are available in FreeWheel’s Audience Manager platform, which enables publishers to unlock faster audience activation across screens. The partnership utilizes Samba TV’s data from opted-in, first-party automatic content recognition – a technology that detects what appears on viewer screens – and FreeWheel’s pool of premium inventory.
“Samba has one of the most comprehensive TV datasets in the industry, and when you combine that with FreeWheel, which has one of the largest premium pools of CTV inventory, it’s a great match in offering for advertisers,” Davis said. “Advertisers are always looking for new types of identifiers and opted-in ACR data is one of the best ways to reach those high-value audiences.”
Final Stretch to Election Day
As Election Day approaches on November 5, political campaigns are ramping up their media spending. FreeWheel and Samba TV seek to help campaigns reach not only broad audiences, but select groups with targeted messaging.
“ACR data is very important for political buyers, and they’re now able to tap into Samba’s political audiences on both a local and national level for their campaigns in as little as 24 hours,” Davis said. “Speed of activation is critical for these buyers to get live in-market as soon as possible. The advertisers are also able to message voters after a big news story or a recent debate.”
