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.
]]>But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?
Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.
But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?
A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…
Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:
“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.
“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”
Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.
Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”
From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.
“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”
The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:
“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.
“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.
“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”
But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”
Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:
“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.
“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>While FreeWheel’s focus has always been on premium video from a variety of publishers, “There’s now a very low threshold for launching a app that will get TV distribution, so there is a big part of the industry now that is long-tail digital video but actually on a TV,” says Smith, who is GM of FreeWheel Markets.
“We spend a lot of time and energy when we’re evaluating who we want to work with to make sure that publishers that we don’t know well go through a pretty exhaustive process,” he adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018. Interviewing Smith for Beet.TV is Matt Prohaska.
Among the items on the inspection checklist are validating traffic and the right to sell inventory to brand safety concerns. “We’ve created a quality threshold that we use for anything that we package up and bring to market. We spend a lot of time educating brands and agencies about that.”
While it’s nothing new to FreeWheel, it’s not a shared regimen.
“We are fortunately enough that we can be fully transparent with what runs in our ecosystem because we have such a focus on quality,” Smith says. “But not everyone in the ecosystem understands that, and if marketers are looking for scale, it’s sometimes easy to trade off scale for lesser quality-inventory.”
Asked whether it’s getting any easier to work with all of the various parties needed to plan and execute campaigns, he feels “we’re getting closer but it’s still very complex.”
Within the major holding companies “it varies pretty significantly. So we invest a lot of time in mapping out those organizations and understanding who the key people are, regardless of title because those titles also kind of vary wildly across holding companies.
“But also ultimately connecting to the teams that work with the brands. Brands are driving the decision-making and the holding companies are trying to serve their needs,” Smith says.
Then there are what he terms “mid-market” agencies that never scaled to the extent of the biggest industry players and whose teams are thus more unified. “The value proposition to those organizations and the level of friction is much lower sometimes than going into the major holding companies. So in some sense we’ve had a lot of success, and I feel like some of those agencies are taking advantage of that unification of linear and digital in a way that the bigger ones are not yet. But I fully believe we’ll get there very quickly.”
Third Quarter Video Stats
Subsequent to this interview, FreeWheel released its Q3 Video Monetization Report. Here are some key findings:
U.S.: Top line ad view growth of 26% year-over-year, fueled in part by 87% ad view growth on IP-enabled MVPD platforms.
U.S.: While the ratio of traditional MVPDs ad views to virtual MVPD ad views on IP-enabled platforms is 80:20, vMVPDs are growing almost twice as fast.
U.S.: OTT devices and smartphones combined now make up 60% of total ad views.
E.U.: There was top-line ad view growth of 16% despite U.S. publisher ad views in Europe declining 21% in light of a cautious approach to the GDPR.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“We absolutely are hearing audiences come up in the Upfront. From our perspective, it’s really been ten years or so since there’s been a significant change in the way that linear inventory is sold,” Smith says in this interview with Beet.TV.
His interpretation of the discourse about audience targeting “is that we’re at a point where there’s significant momentum for the next evolution of that. Most publishers are offering an audience component of that this year. When we go out with our linear sales organization and talk to marketers, that’s what they’re looking for us to do as well.”
With its deep technology relationships with premium video publishers, FreeWheel provides incremental reach for advertisers and monetization opportunities that avoid sales channel conflict with publishers’ direct sales teams.
“We really look at ourselves as a monetization service that the most premium linear and digital publishers can tap into to help complement what their sales organizations are doing in the market,” Smith explains.
As a part of the extended Comcast family, FreeWheel is unique in its involvement with both digital and linear video. It works with all manner of advertisers on the buy-side.
“Being part of Comcast, at one end of the spectrum we’ve got the Comcast Spotlight local sales organization plugged into our market. So they’re working with advertisers as small as local pizza shops or local car dealerships to be able to access premium inventory through our market.”
Then there is the FreeWheel national sales team. While it’s typically worked with advertisers seeking more efficient reach, “more and more we’ve been working with the major agencies and major advertisers to take advantage of some of our unique capabilities, including what we can do with audience leveraging some of the Comcast data,” Smith says.
Asked to survey the landscape going forward and what changes he envisions, Smith cites uniform measurement and better calculation of ROI.
“There’s still challenges in getting measurement in a unified way across all screens where someone would watch premium video. There’s still specific screens like OTT, connected TV where there are no industry standard measurement solutions.”
ROI starts with understanding who an advertiser is trying to reach and whether they are the appropriate target. “And then we can continue down funnel and look at how we can connect TV back to attribution” in line with KPI’s.
Since FreeWheel is “relatively new to the buy-side conversation,” at Cannes Smith is looking forward to meeting with “the world’s major marketers and be able to tell our story,” in addition to forming additional partnerships to “help solve some of these major industry challenges, like measurement and attribution in television.”
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.
]]>Citing the FreeWheel Video Monetization Report for the second quarter of 2017, combined OTT, connected-TV device and set-top box VOD represented 49% of consumption in its ad management platform, says Neil Smith, SVP, FreeWheel Markets.
“It’s really shifted to the actual television screen,” Smith says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
It’s been about a year since FreeWheel and StickyADS.tv came together via acquisition. One of the biggest yields has been a unified solution for publishers that have traditionally sold most of their inventory through direct-sale insertion orders.
Now, having added a programmatic sales channel facilitates “a unified ad decision against any demand that publisher has access to,” says Smith.
As a result, there’s more unification of sales efforts as digital and linear work together. FreeWheel is seeing “a much bigger appetite and focus on programmatic guaranteed deals.” Switching from paper insertion order deals into programmatic pipes “but still fixed price guaranteed,” is how Smith explains it.
Being able to safely deliver programmatic executions in premium environments has led to more opportunities for sellers and buyers.
“We have a number of publishers that have major live sporting events and they’re now starting to use programmatic monetization in those events,” says Smith. “And the reality is it’s a great use case for it.”
For example, if a game goes into overtime, if a series runs to a seventh game, the ability exists to “tap into that impression by impression demand in a way that’s safe and doesn’t disrupt the user experience or cause sales channel conflict with direct-sold ads.”
One of FreeWheel’s main priorities has been extending the programmatic solutions it’s long offered for desktop, mobile, OTT and set-top box VOD into the traditional linear TV realm.
“We’ve got a good idea of what brands and markets are looking for as we move in the next generation of premium video and television. It’s really now a matter of execution,” says Smith.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“There are different levels of maturity in terms of the ease or liquidity of programmatic transactions and there are different challenges across each of them,” says Neil Smith, who handles programmatic digital as SVP, Markets, at the industry’s most complete advertising management system FreeWheel.
With many publishers of premium desktop inventory sold programmatically, it’s less about infrastructure and audiences. In a broad ecosystem with lots of long-tail, non-premium video, the big concerns are “how do you surface the right information and package that inventory up so that advertisers can find that inventory that meets their needs and ultimately really extracts more value from the inventory,” Smith says in this interview with Beet.TV.
On the other end of the spectrum are set-top box VOD and OTT platforms. With the former, “all of the pipes aren’t even connected yet,” Smith says. “We’re still at that stage of enabling dynamic ad insertion in those platforms so you can even engage in programmatic transactions.”
Things are a bit better with OTT devices but measurement is limited. “So we have kind of a fragmented world in terms of viewership but also very fragmented in terms of capabilities.”
Within FreeWheel’s customer base, most view programmatic as “a transaction model,” Smith says. While traditional insertion orders supplement programmatic channels, “When they’re doing it through programmatic channels, they’re definitely gravitating more to private marketplaces.”
Reasons for this include personal relationships between buyers and sellers and sellers seeking unique information about inventory to match up with their objectives. “We do see publishers start to dabble with the more open world, but it’s done using as much control as possible with regard to what inventory is made available and what information about that inventory is made available,” Smith explains.
One of the challenges of expanding OTT device inventory in a fully open market is a lack of information about the inventory—owing partly to a lack of personal relationships. “If you don’t have all of those audience measurement capabilities that you can pass, the buying in an open marketplace is much more difficult,” Smith says. “We’re seeing some success with desktop there, but really for the platforms that are emerging that almost has to be sold through private marketplaces today.”
Another emerging trend Smith notes is programmatic guarantees involving “the idea of a traditional Upfront deal that’s executed on an IO basis” but run through “a programmatic pipe.”
Asked where things might progress in the next 12 months, Smith hopes for less fragmented programmatic capabilities and better measurement, leading to convergence of linear and other premium video “so that publishers can monetize it as a unified pool but also marketers can access their target audience across any screen.”
He believes that FreeWheel both from the digital and linear side “is in a great position to make that happen for the ecosystem.”
This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying The New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.
]]>But a new rationalism has recently dawned on the vendor community, and ad-tech suppliers, aware they won’t change the TV industry overnight, now realise they must work with existing TV industry structures and business models.
At a Beet Retreat panel, a variety of executives debated how so-called “programmatic” technology might gain a foothold in traditional TV.
And Jamie West, advanced ad director of leading UK pay-TV platform Sky, which has trialled DataXu and a combination of FreeWheel and Videology as ad-tech suppliers, told the panel of suppliers what a broadcast operator is looking for.
“The ad-tech industry consistently and regularly over-promises and under-delivers,” West said. “Claiming that you can create world peace, make millions for the business, just doesn’t wash anymore.
“We need to take in to account regulatory compliance, customer experience, advertiser experience. You need to ensure we can deliver out against every single element, before we start thinking about how we’re going to move to a biddable platform or process.
“I don’t see that we’re going to have a huge amount of RTB in TV, but we will have inventory traded via full system-to-system integration between agency/advertiser and platform publisher.”
FreeWheel markets SVP Neil Smith conceded: “Nobody’s going to rip out existing (TV industry) systems, they work really well and serve their purpose.” So he feels the question becomes: “How can we build out an evolution for enabling those systems to talk better with each other, to ultimately where we move to a state where the technology converges?”
Google global partnerships top partner lead Amy Young explained why she had been hired from CBS: “One of the impetuses was, they realised, we need to understand a bit more about how the broadcast business works. Direct sales is not going away.”
DataXu co-founder Sandro Catanzaro explained: “We believe (TV ad) spots are here for quite a while. Technology that works today should enable to traffic in spots as well as an impression-by-impression level.”
Videology partnerships SVP Tony Yi acknowledged that “there’s a lot of legacy systems” in the TV industry, but his company has found a way to work with broadcasters’ ongoing inclination to use them for the time being.
This panel was moderated by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That means advertisers, too, must catch up to deliver messages across multiple platforms, a panel debate convened by Beet.TV heard:
“Fifty percent of inventory is now off desktops and laptops,” said FreeWheel’s Smith, whose company recently formed the Council for Premium Video. “If you want to be premium inventory, you have to look at it from a cross-screen standpoint now.”
The consumer viewpoint was an observation echoed by AOL’s Fenn: “They think, ‘I want my content when and where I want it’,” he said.”
So, how do marketers pull off that trick? Most want to, but getting there may be harder. “A lot of them aren’t ready yet to have different creatives across different devices,” observed Tremor’s Baum.
So, discovering the right size of ads to fit on to different device contexts, even for the same consumer, is critical.
AOL is due to publish a two-phase piece of Nielsen research aiming to help marketers, incorporating a matrix advising on the appropriate video ad length for different circumstances plus advising on best practice for creative ad optimization.
AOL’s Fenn pointed to recent Facebook efforts, encouraging advertisers to place logos and key messages earlier in what, ultimately, should be shorter video ads. He said there are three challenges to multi-screen ad buying:
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
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