CTV ad tech companies are trying to mimic the simplicity of digital ad buying, and it requires two things packaged together: data and speed.
On Wednesday, FreeWheel unveiled a sell-side product called Audience Manager to help CTV programmers tie granular audience segments to their inventory at the speed of programmatic advertising, according to Chief Product Officer David Dworin. The new tool is integrated with FreeWheel’s TV tech platform, which includes its SSP and ad server.
To make CTV advertising work, programmers require interoperability across multiple identity graphs, said Seth Wernick, SVP of revenue operations at Crackle, a streaming service Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment bought from Sony in 2019.
A single CTV campaign could span content distributors, streaming apps and perhaps some demand- and supply-side platforms in addition to FreeWheel’s ad server, for example. And every company involved in a CTV ad buy has its own way of categorizing viewers.
The Audience Manager product aims to consolidate more identity data to make sure valuable audiences don’t get lost within this web of identity graphs.
For now, Audience Manager deals in CTV inventory, but should expand to include linear addressable next year. Currently, 13 publishers are using Audience Manager, including Crackle.
ID, please
Audience Manager has a marketplace that gives publishers direct access to an array of third-party identity providers. Off-the-shelf audience packages with data from LiveRamp, Experian and TransUnion are new with this product launch (although FreeWheel already had separate partnerships with these data providers).
With more detailed audience segments available at hand, programmers can justify raising inventory floor prices, which is becoming an “industry standard” for maximizing publisher yield, Wernick said.
More data also improves match rates, which should help publishers avoid overtargeting the same households. Advertisers can also layer in interest-based segments, such as people in the market for a new car or frequent fliers, which can help the same campaign reach more unique households (and potentially new customers).
Need for speed
With targeted TV ads, there’s a common concern about addressable scale. After all, it’s a finite and pricey pool of media.
Still, direct access to additional identity providers speeds up the matching process enough that Audience Manager should actually help ad buys reach more viewers, not fewer, Wernick said.
With Audience Manager, FreeWheel ad sellers can create segments within 24 hours once they upload their DMPs to the platform.
According to FreeWheel, the time lapse between creating and activating audience segments through Audience Manager dropped 66% on average compared to its previous audience builder.
Before, FreeWheel publishers and third-party identity partners required a few hops. Data traveled from a publisher’s DMP to an identity data vendor, then made its way back to FreeWheel. The whole process could take days, depending on the data partner, Dworin said.
Within Audience Manager, publishers can sell inventory for specific audiences directly or programmatically through demand-side platforms integrated with FreeWheel, which the company declined to name.
Audience Manager is currently available only in the US, but FreeWheel intends to expand the product globally over the course of the next year.
