“You sit across all of it and see it all and are close to the technology because you’re building the technology. Help us sort of translate that over to the buy side,” is how FreeWheel GM Dave Clark explains the first part.

“The second big shift we’ve seen in our business is a growing number of our publisher clients are now asking us to bring demand to the table, because providing world class software to manage their monetization is not enough” Clark, who is General Manager, FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan.

Not that long ago, the company’s clients were quite content with FreeWheel being a technology provider. “But now there are other software players in the ecosystem who are trying to disrupt the ecosystem by bringing demand to the table, so they’re asking us to do the same.”

Clark says a key differentiator for the new FreeWheel Media is that it has designed solutions, business rules and swim lanes “together with our publishers, so it’s complementary to their business and can enhance their business, which is really important to them.”

The backdrop against which the TV industry is trying to harmonize and unify targeting, measurement and attribution is the reality that media buyers know how easy these things can be done on digital platforms, according to Clark.

FreeWheel’s intended takeaway for attendees of its NOWFRONT event is that while “there’s a lot of complexity in doing this, but we’re working hard at it. Here’s where we are, therefore here’s what you can buy today, here’s what we need to solve next and please work with us on that.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

“Thinking back 12 years ago, I wouldn’t imagine that we’re doing the FreeWheel NOWFRONT,” Yu says of the company’s recent event, at which it raised the public curtain on FreeWheel Media. In this Beet.TV interview, she also talks about the need for gender diversity in the workplace, or “balance for better.”

Having started as a technology company serving publishers, “It’s very exciting, moving to the buy-side,” Yu says. “FreeWheel can as a platform provide the end-to-end solution from marketers and agencies all the way to the sell side. Which is pretty exciting if you think about it, the dramatic change.”

The company’s evolution requires broadening its view of the industry and, more to the point, the view of the buy-side.

“We have to think from a marketer and agency lens because they have a very different need,” Yu says. “As a platform, to enable that we need to reinvent and that’s basically what my team is working on. Reinvent our platform to be able to see through the marketer’s lens.”

What’s much easier to recognize are the benefits to be gained by having a diverse workforce, according to Yu.

“I’m actually a big believer in balance for the better,” she explains, referring to the #BalanceforBetter theme of the 2019 International Womens Day. “So we have to provide the better balance for any organization to thrive. We started since day one of FreeWheel. We have a foundation where we believe we have to bring the diversity…have the female technologists as well as the male technologists together to build a platform for the better.

“As we continue on that mode we will be able to be very successful, be a strong organization, with a strong culture where everyone with all different backgrounds are welcome here. Which is a great culture to be in.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

“Looking at a deterministic ID needs to be the way that we move,” McElhinney explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan.

As part of that push, the media agency has been working on a new entity called Big, which Advertising Age reports will operate under a 100% performance-based model. It’s part of Horizon’s quest to have more than half of its ad deals to be guaranteed on business outcomes within the next three to five years.

“We want to make sure that we’re spending our money in the right way and that we’re reaching our audience effectively, that we’re not overdoing it, that we’re not saturating it so much that they’re leaving the brand, that we’re upsetting them,” says McElhinney.

Asked about the availability of targeting data, she says it’s still not easy enough to obtain.

“Not all of our vendors are going to give us back the data that we need, and not all of our clients will even give us first-party data to the point that it would be super helpful to us.”

With the 2019 television Upfront events already under way, McElhinney believes they are still an essential ritual. “The Upfronts aren’t going to go away. Relationships are very important, those conversations up front are very important. Reach frequency doesn’t go away, impressions and GRP’s don’t go away,” she says.

What has been changing “is that we have more data available to us that we can now marry that with that way of buying, that way of approaching the TV audience.” More data available will help to inform deterministic ID’s and “get more addressable, get more targeted to a tighter audience. As opposed to just throwing a big net over it.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

While FreeWheel has long built and maintained a technology platform connecting its publisher customers—mainly TV programmers and MVPD’s—with media buyers, its media sales team will now give publishers access to additional demand for their inventory.

“We’ve been selling media for a few years, but we’re really looking to raise awareness that FreeWheel Markets has media sales division,” Smith says.

“We have two missions,” he explains in this Beet.TV interview. “First, building the marketplace platform for television where we can connect any buyer and seller to transact on premium video. Two, we also are a media sales organization that brings unique and differentiated media solutions to marketers.”

He notes that the media ecosystem has “a lot of entities that talk about future states” and “there’s still a long road to go,” but there’s plenty of value to be derived from the current state of advanced TV as it relates to reach, audience unification and media accountability.

“We’re very much a thought leader in thinking through some of the challenges of linear and digital convergence, audience measurement and attribution across all screens,” Smith says. “We want to showcase that and showcase some of the partners we’re working with to drive the leading innovative solutions in those areas.”

FreeWheel considers itself to be a “technology anchor” for premium TV and video. With its supply side platform, publishers can execute in a direct-sold, insertion-order manner and “also execute with a degree of automation” in programmatic mode.

With FreeWheel Media, those same publishers will have access to additional demand while having “the most amount of control as possible as to who’s able to monetize their inventory and under what conditions.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

It’s commonly expressed as how does digital media complement or overlap reach, Hogue, who is SVP of Digital Client Solutions, says in this Beet.TV interview at the FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan this week.

“Having brought more measurement and more metrics to market, we’re helping media sellers to package that data in new ways that follow the consumer,” says Hogue. “That helps media sellers to put together that audience in a way that is consistent and comparable across those experiences. And on the buy side it helps them have a consistent set of measures that walk across.”

One of Nielsen’s more recent contributions to the cause was adding YouTube to its Total Ad Ratings, which was announced in January. It enables advertisers to determine whether their ads are reaching people on TV and mobile devices, as MediaPost reports.

“That’s a huge deal because of the size and scope of YouTube,” Hogue adds. “And being able to have that covered in our measurement component was important for advertisers, again to be able to see the full impact of their digital exposure.”

Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings are hardly new, but “we’re continuing to see the demand for them and for more uses in terms of showing where digital is incremental or complementary to traditional television.”

Metrics like reach and frequency and duration are fundamental “to pretty much any other business decision that you’re going to make,” says Hogue. Among other things, they help to inform the “next level of decision making,” for example when and how to move into addressable TV.

She cites CFlight as a means of packaging data in a way that “helps NBCU be able to go to market in a different way that sort of releases us from the constraints of a C3, C7 model and allows us to bring more data into that equation.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

FreeWheel is teaming with Data Plus Math and other attribution solutions providers to deliver faster insights into campaign performance. “A lot of times, you get information about how your campaign’s doing, especially around attribution and it’s far too often six months or even longer after a campaign’s over. It doesn’t allow you to optimize a campaign or in any way shape or form improve the performance during the flight,” says Wallach, who is SVP/CRO, FreeWheel Media.

To further enlarge its audience viewing data beyond Comcast’s huge footprint, FreeWheel is adding Inscape’s data set for “even more robust reporting capability,” particularly in the streaming video space. Data from more than 10 million opt-in Vizio smart TVs will be available to better target specific demographic and audience segments in TV ad deals, as Advertising Age reports.

“Since Vizio does go outside of the Comcast footprint, we can now start to model incremental reach and other access to consumers outside of our footprint,” Wallach adds.

FreeWheel will work with Adobe to help overcome the complexities of programmatic transactions in premium video. Given that most demand-side platforms were built to handle display ads, “Now you bring them into the living room and it creates a different type of environment. We’re working closely with the DSPs to solve for this and we’re leveraging our Drive platform to be able to promote audiences to them through Deal IDs so they can transact programmatically,” Wallach says.

“The reality is most DSPs try to use data from their side. They have different data arrangements and then they try to find the audiences in that live movement when the bidder is working.”

FreeWheel will “package up that inventory on a pre-bid basis, based on our insight and our data set having access to the ad server and the information that’s coming from there,” thereby leveraging the capabilities of DSPs “to bid appropriately on that supply.”

The latest partnerships enhance FreeWheel’s ability to talk to customers holistically about video in all its forms, according to Wallach.

For buyers of linear TV who also need to find audiences on OTT and CTV, “we’re able to help guide them and put together the right solutions for them.” For digital pure-play buyers looking for more reach beyond FreeWheel’s digital supply, “we can start to package in TV if they’re looking for audiences and impressions in that environment as well.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined.  For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.