SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico\u2014With more long-tail video migrating to television distribution, vetting that content is a demanding process, according to Neil Smith of FreeWheel Markets. A bit easier but also required is being able to map the personnel structure of major agency holding companies to figure out whom the company needs to work with.<\/p>\n
While FreeWheel\u2019s focus has always been on premium video from a variety of publishers, \u201cThere\u2019s 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,\u201d says Smith, who is GM of FreeWheel Markets<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe spend a lot of time and energy when we\u2019re evaluating who we want to work with to make sure that publishers that we don\u2019t know well go through a pretty exhaustive process,\u201d he adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018<\/a>.\u00a0 Interviewing Smith for Beet.TV is Matt Prohaska.<\/p>\n Among the items on the inspection checklist are validating traffic and the right to sell inventory to brand safety concerns. \u201cWe\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n While it\u2019s nothing new to FreeWheel, it\u2019s not a shared regimen.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are fortunately enough that we can be fully transparent with what runs in our ecosystem because we have such a focus on quality,\u201d Smith<\/a> says. \u201cBut not everyone in the ecosystem understands that, and if marketers are looking for scale, it\u2019s sometimes easy to trade off scale for lesser quality-inventory.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked whether it\u2019s getting any easier to work with all of the various parties needed to plan and execute campaigns, he feels \u201cwe\u2019re getting closer but it\u2019s still very complex.\u201d<\/p>\n Within the major holding companies \u201cit 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBut 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,\u201d Smith says.<\/p>\n Then there are what he terms \u201cmid-market\u201d agencies that never scaled to the extent of the biggest industry players and whose teams are thus more unified. \u201cThe 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\u2019ve 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\u2019ll get there very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n Third Quarter Video Stats<\/p>\n