FreeWheel's Digital-Like Way of Buying TV Is Ready for Prime Time

Ad-tech firm's unified decision capability expands to OTT

NBCUniversal, The Trade Desk and FreeWheel are partnering to bring a digital-like ad-buying approach to over-the-top (OTT) television.

FreeWheel introduced its unified decision capability, which allows direct-sold and programmatic inventory to compete against each other in the same marketplace, last April with A+E Networks as a test partner. Now, Freewheel’s product is widely available, with a major publisher and a major DSP activating OTT campaigns using that technology.

“The idea is if a publisher like NBC has available supply that they want to transact in the most intelligent way, how are they engaging all of their demand partners to make sure they’re plugging that demand into the marketplace where it can access the supply pool as frictionlessly as possible?” said Geoff Wolinetz, head of sell-side revenue at FreeWheel.

FreeWheel’s unified decision feature is similar to the dynamic allocation function that Google introduced in the early years of digital programmatic, which eventually spurred header...

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