FreeWheel is \u201cvery happy to be heavily investing in Cannes again this year\u201d as it looks to broaden its footprint on the buy side and find more strategic partners to tackle industry issues like attribution and measurement in television. As is the case in the ongoing TV Upfront season, there will be lots of discussion about advanced audience targeting, says Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe absolutely are hearing audiences come up in the Upfront. From our perspective, it\u2019s really been ten years or so since there\u2019s been a significant change in the way that linear inventory is sold,\u201d Smith says in this interview with Beet.TV.<\/p>\n

His interpretation of the discourse about audience targeting \u201cis that we\u2019re at a point where there\u2019s 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\u2019s what they\u2019re looking for us to do as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 direct sales teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d Smith explains.<\/p>\n

As a part of the extended Comcast family, FreeWheel<\/a> is unique in its involvement with both digital and linear video. It works with all manner of advertisers on the buy-side.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing part of Comcast, at one end of the spectrum we\u2019ve got the Comcast Spotlight local sales organization plugged into our market. So they\u2019re working with advertisers as small as local pizza shops or local car dealerships to be able to access premium inventory through our market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there is the FreeWheel national sales team. While it\u2019s typically worked with advertisers seeking more efficient reach, \u201cmore and more we\u2019ve 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,\u201d Smith<\/a> says.<\/p>\n

Asked to survey the landscape going forward and what changes he envisions, Smith cites uniform measurement and better calculation of ROI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s still challenges in getting measurement in a unified way across all screens where someone would watch premium video. There\u2019s still specific screens like OTT, connected TV where there are no industry standard measurement solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

ROI starts with understanding who an advertiser is trying to reach and whether they are the appropriate target. \u201cAnd then we can continue down funnel and look at how we can connect TV back to attribution\u201d in line with KPI\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Since FreeWheel is \u201crelatively new to the buy-side conversation,\u201d at Cannes<\/a> Smith is looking forward to meeting with \u201cthe world\u2019s major marketers and be able to tell our story,\u201d in addition to forming additional partnerships to \u201chelp solve some of these major industry challenges, like measurement and attribution in television.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. For more videos from the series, please visit this page<\/a>. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FreeWheel is \u201cvery happy to be heavily investing in Cannes again this year\u201d as it looks to broaden its footprint on the buy side and find more strategic partners to tackle industry issues like attribution and measurement in television. As is the case in the ongoing TV Upfront season, there will be lots of discussion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":52642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[]},"categories":[7262],"tags":[5296,5267,5661,7259],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52632"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}