The rallying cry for interoperability in TV advertising is creating unlikely bedfellows.
On Thursday, Magnite and Comcast-owned FreeWheel announced a technical integration to allow publishers that use FreeWheel’s ad server to see demand for inventory within Magnite’s supply-side platform (SSP).
FreeWheel’s customers will now get visibility into advertiser information tied to bid requests via Magnite in advance of making ad placement decisions, including bid price, brand name, category and creative. Warner Bros. Discovery is one of the companies piloting the new integration.
Although Magnite and FreeWheel are rivals on the surface – both companies have their own SSPs and ad servers used by major TV programmers – the ad tech ecosystem is all about strategic frenemy-ships.
Some publishers, for example, use FreeWheel’s ad server and Magnite’s SSP. This addition to FreeWheel’s sell-side tech stack is “solely for clients using our ad server and choosing to monetize a portion of their inventory through Magnite,” said Matt Clark, VP of strategic partnerships at FreeWheel.
If those media owners can manage bid requests from Magnite in the same place as their other programmatic and direct-sold deals, they can increase their inventory yield, Clark said, which would bring in more money for both companies.
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Many major media companies also source demand through multiple SSPs, which means that publishers often have insufficient information about bid requests.
A publisher might know an advertiser’s category, for instance, but not its name, and only get access to that important detail in the seconds before an ad placement is decided or, even worse, afterward.
Poor data transmission can limit publishers from getting to charge higher CPMs, Clark said.
Sometimes, a buyer may also be willing to bid higher to nab specific inventory or reach a particular audience, but that information isn’t transmitted to the ad server until it’s too late.
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With a more direct link between Magnite’s tech and FreeWheel’s ad server, “buyers can now adjust their bidding in real time based on each individual ad opportunity,” and have that bid reflected throughout the bidding process until the placement is decided, said Magnite CRO Sean Buckley.
But publishers also need more information about advertisers in bid requests in order to control for brand safety, competitive separation and frequency capping.
If a publisher only has access to an advertiser’s category and not its name, there’s no way to guarantee competitive separation in a pod – and that could get awkward.
For example, although there aren’t always restrictions against including two consumer-packaged goods brands in the same ad pod, there might be strict separation rules between fierce competitors like Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
Publishers must be able to identify specific brands far enough in advance before putting together a pod.
And being able to do so should also help eliminate the issue of serving the same ad creative in the same pod multiple times, a huge viewer pet-peeve that also wastes ad spend and reduces inventory yield.
“We’ve heard loud and clear from publishers that they need granular information from all demand sources in one place to make [the best] ad decisions based on both user experience and yield,” Clark said.
