Many have promised connected TV will open up TV advertising for smaller ad buyers.
To do so will require moving away from complex, high-touch sales toward the speed and simplicity that made digital platforms dominant. This is the thinking behind Universal Ads, a platform built by FreeWheel to create a “frictionless environment” between CTV publishers and smaller buyers, according to Cara Sogliuzzo, senior director, strategic relationships at FreeWheel.
In this video interview with Beet.TV’s Lisa Granatstein, Sogliuzzo explained that the goal is to create an “easy button” for a transaction that has historically been out of reach for many.
Tapping into the long tail
The CTV industry needs more demand diversity, Sogliuzzo argued. “There is about a thousand advertisers who buy everything, and if they’re buying across the CTV ecosystem, it creates not the best user experience for those who are watching your content,” she said. By opening the doors to a wider array of advertisers, publishers can improve the viewing experience while tapping into a significant new revenue stream.
This requires a deliberate plan. For publishers, Sogliuzzo advised a strategic review of their inventory to identify what can be offered to this new segment.
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The goal is to expand the advertiser base exponentially. “By going to buyers who may be smaller or spend smaller budgets and have not worked in CTV before, you’re hitting a whole new level of advertisers and going from maybe a thousand overall to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and creating way more demand diversity,” Sogliuzzo said. This shift, she believes, makes the ad experience “visually better” for consumers.
Making CTV fast and simple
The opportunity is substantial in a market where US CTV ad spending is projected to grow 16.8% to reach $33.48 billion in 2025.
Attracting these new advertisers hinges on mimicking the platforms they already use. “The way that the publishers can make their inventory more attractive is understanding why search and social has commandeered so much of the market,” Sogliuzzo said.
The Universal Ads platform, which launched in January 2025 with partners including NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, is designed to integrate into existing workflows. For media owners already using FreeWheel’s ad server or SSP, there is no new technology to learn. “The publisher partners and their teams do not need to learn any new technology or any new workflows to set this up,” Sogliuzzo noted.
For buyers, the experience is designed to be just as familiar. “They’re doing the same thing that they would do in a Meta, Snapchat, Google AdWords environment so that they can say, ‘Oh, this is really easy for me to put money into’,” she explained.
A foundational year of learning
Since its launch, Universal Ads has been in a foundational, test-and-learn phase. Sogliuzzo observed that the publishers seeing the most immediate benefits are those embracing an experimental mindset, ready to adjust their strategies based on real-time feedback from a market that moves quickly.
“Where we’re seeing the most success is partners and publisher partners that want to work with us that are eager to learn and to learn quickly,” she said.
“They are testing, they are failing, they are pivoting, and they’re creating opportunities for themselves.” Because of the platform’s speed, optimizations can happen rapidly, leading to faster revenue generation.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from the Premium Programmatic Summit 2025, presented by FreeWheel. For more videos from this series, please visit this page .
