Steve Ellwanger

Having to innovate and “re-innovate” is nothing new at FreeWheel, which Diane Yu helped to create in 2007 after leaving Google/DoubleClick. But even the CTO herself is rather amazed at the company’s evolution to a platform serving both buyers and sellers. “Thinking back 12 years ago, I wouldn’t imagine that we’re doing the FreeWheel NOWFRONT,” […]

ORLANDO—Video game giant Electronic Arts didn’t decide overnight to buy media in-house across more than 40 countries. Building an in-house capability can start with baby steps, dipping your toe into the waters and, along the way, nurturing your talent so as to avoid “tissue rejection,” says EA Global Head of Media Belinda Smith. After buying […]

ORLANDO—Not that long ago, in-house agencies were where “old creatives went to die because they were done with the advertising industry. That has definitely shifted,” says the VP and COO of 140, Verizon’s in-house agency. Now, because in-house talent at companies like Verizon are in close in proximity to corporate leadership, among other factors, “that […]

Amid the push for more performance-based advertising campaign outcomes from deterministic consumer identities, Horizon Media is building its own identity solution. “With the help of our partners, we can now attach that ID to build the deterministic ID. That’s going to allow us to advertise more one to one and get more toward people based […]

Marketers that are seeking to better understand consumers’ identities need to start by earning consumer trust and then build platforms that are “privacy by design” were two main takeaways from a panel at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum. It seems likely there won’t be one central identity graph for each person judging from comments by […]

One of the main purposes of FreeWheel’s recent NOWFRONT event was to formally announce FreeWheel Media, its new media sales division. The “now” is a reference to educating the market on “what you can do today” in the advanced-television space,” says FreeWheel Markets GM Neil Smith. While FreeWheel has long built and maintained a technology […]

Omnicom Media Group’s Jonathan Steuer is encouraged by the emergence of solutions that “co-mingle” set-top box and automatic content recognition viewing data, the most recent example of which is FreeWheel Media working with Inscape. At the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan, Steuer, who is Chief Research Officer, welcomed the “consistent effort across almost all […]

FreeWheel is bringing in-flight advertising campaign attribution optimization across traditional television, OTT and digital video via a partnership with Data Plus Math. “When we work with FreeWheel, we’re really measuring FreeWheel’s inventory,” says John Hoctor, Co-Founder & CEO of Data Plus Math. What Data Plus Math brings to Comcast’s FreeWheel is “a fast, automated and […]

A continuing theme on the demand side is the desire to know how digital media and television can best work together. It boils down to “a need for more consistency and better fluency between the different measured media,” says Nielsen’s Jessica Hogue. It’s commonly expressed as how does digital media complement or overlap reach, Hogue, […]

Comcast’s FreeWheel has new partnerships with Data Plus Math, Vizio’s Inscape data unit and Adobe to augment its attribution, consumer insights and programmatic offerings. In this interview with Beet.TV, FreeWheel Media’s Brian Wallach explains the three deals announced at the FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan this week. FreeWheel is teaming with Data Plus Math and […]

Smart-TV manufacturer Vizio is teaming up with nine major media and technology companies to create an addressable advertising standard for the industry. Along with Vizio and its data unit Inscape, the consortium’s members are AMC Networks, CBS, Discovery, FreeWheel, Hearst Television, NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co. and Xandr, as Reuters reports. Called Project OAR (Open Addressable […]

Every new breakthrough in understanding television viewer identities creates more complexity for buyers. A case in point is being able to use set-top box data to show how linear TV viewing impacts other media and advertisers’ business outcomes, as underscored by a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding […]

AT&T’s more than 170 million consumer relationships—north of 140 million of them in the mobile space—generate a ton of data. For Turner, the data from those relationships will be the basis for optimizing and guaranteeing campaigns based on business outcomes. Such guaranteed optimization could emerge by late this year or early 2020, Turner’s Dan Aversano […]

Consultant Matt Prohaska has been into digital media from its cookie roots to the modern day quest to track consumer identities across platforms. A frequent Beet.TV contributor, Prohaska also was a key participant in the recent leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World. In this event recap, Prohaska, […]

Like many companies, Comscore plays an important role in seeking to derive unduplicated reach curves for television audiences, along with other data advancements. It recently played a key role in a project with NBCUniversal in which NBCU guaranteed business outcomes for the first time, in a campaign for the movie The Upside. Comscore’s seat at […]

As identity resolution migrates from digital media to various forms of television, there are gaps to close as turf wars abound, says 4INFO’s Mari Tangredi. The end goal is to bring “some of the things that people have gotten used to in digital forward into the TV space. We’re bridging that gap between them.” From […]

Using data to power identity graphs requires talent and a new way of looking at media planning and activation. But it’s all of little use unless creative and media people at agencies form effective means of collaborating, according to Erin Matts. The newly appointed U.S. CEO of Hearts & Science sees progress being made on […]

PHOENIX — If Maggie Zhang could choose a tagline for this year it would be “prove incremental value.” Because while it’s a given that digital and television advertising works, “altogether we need to understand how each channel, each different tactic actually works and contributes to the final outcome in order to advise or inform advertisers […]

PHOENIX – Between legacy data warehouses and other consumer information, marketers are “drowning in massive amounts of data,” says Art Muldoon of Amnet Group US. Given that some 80% of data is unstructured, “What that means is we’re really trying as marketers to find what are the best sources of data that’s most actionable to […]

PHOENIX – Converge and you will find convergence seems like an apt metaphor to describe the combination of Amobee and Videology. Easing the way forward is the ability to “make sure that connected TV starts to look like linear,” says Amobee’s John Rogers. Six months ago, multichannel video demand-side platform Amobee acquired Videology. Now the […]