More contextual audiences are coming to CTV.
On Monday, FreeWheel announced the integration of Proximic by Comscore’s contextual audience data directly into its ad management platform.
The integration will allow for a more granular level of targeting on inventory sold through FreeWheel’s ad server – something that media buyers in particular have been interested in seeing from publishers.
Paramount, which uses FreeWheel as its primary ad server, is the first publisher to tap into this data, which it’s doing via its own EyeQ ad selling platform. But the data will also be made available to more publishers later this year.
Marrying data
Proximic derives its audiences from a large panel of opted-in users that share their content consumption habits and are then placed into categories based on their interests.
This data doesn’t rely on personal identifiers, making it adaptable to the strictest interpretations of privacy laws as US states continue to roll out new ones, said Rachel Gantz, managing director of Proximic.
More importantly for advertisers, though, the data can be sorted based on potential purchase intent. Think anything from auto intenders or diaper buyers to health-specific audiences that are difficult to source under current privacy regulations.
Comscore is then able to marry the data with publisher-provided content information in FreeWheel to predict which audiences will be most interested in what types of content, and vice versa.
The predictive model “is what ultimately enables us to create these audiences that are not reliant on a user identifier,” said Gantz.
Pros and cons
Before, a brand that wanted to buy against a contextual audience in FreeWheel would have to provide it themselves, either by using their own first-party data or data from a third-party provider like Proximic.
According to Scott Ensign, chief strategy officer at media agency Butler/Till, there are significant advantages – and drawbacks – to this approach.
“The pro is you’re closer to the supply,” he said. “You should have higher match rates with your audience [and] data.”
On the other hand, a company that uses multiple SSPs would have to recreate that custom workflow over and over again for each individual platform, which can be time-consuming and costly.
The direct integration between FreeWheel and Proximic removes that friction.
By making Comscore’s taxonomy directly accessible in FreeWheel’s platform, the hope is that FreeWheel will be able to simplify buying against contextual audiences, said Matt Clark, VP of partnerships at FreeWheel.
“If we can work in a collaborative way with the publisher and with Comscore to make it so that as little additional work as possible is required for the publisher,” Clark said, “we view that as a real value add.”
The future of CTV
So far, Paramount is the only publisher taking advantage of the FreeWheel/Comscore integration. But when – or, more accurately, if – other publishers jump on board, it could impact how their inventory is sold.
Historically, publishers have been reluctant to make show-level information available in the bidstream out of fear that demand will end up skewing toward more popular shows over others.
But publishers are also reticent to provide show-level transparency for another reason: fear of running afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act if that information is tied to a personal identifier.
ID-free audiences can help with that, but they aren’t a slam dunk solution for other issues within CTV advertising, such as the current lack of proper frequency caps.
If audiences can’t be identified, there’s no way to ensure they aren’t being served too many of the same ads over and over again. To manage that issue would require clearer industrywide standards or a universal identifier.
Still, if Comscore and FreeWheel can demonstrate that this integration with Paramount has monetization benefits for publishers, it could prove to be a win-win for buyers and sellers alike.
“I prefer anything that continues to bring CTV and premium video advertising the same tools that we have available to us [in] all of the other places in digital media,” Ensign said. “I see this as a further move toward more digital, addressable, accountable formats.”
