FreeWheel

Now that OTT devices are responsible for the lion’s share of premium video viewing, there’s no shortage of content on the publisher side. What is lacking is a deep understanding of how best to buy and sell OTT inventory, which FreeWheel is addressing with its new research track called Signature Insights. The first installment of […]

What’s the difference between bidding on real-time, digital advertising avails and addressable television inventory? Not much, thanks to aggregation and automation. While the national addressable TV footprint grows bigger with each passing year, many advertisers are making use of household targeting to hone in on specific audiences. And those capabilities are getting more sophisticated, as […]

Viewing of premium video is certainly fragmented. But the same holds true for selling ad inventory programmatically, regardless of whether “pipes are connected” from the desktop all the way to set-top box video on demand. “There are different levels of maturity in terms of the ease or liquidity of programmatic transactions and there are different […]

CANNES — Cannes Lions is billed as “the international festival of creativity” but, judging from some of the tech talk that has made in-roads in recent years, you could forgive a delegate for not feeling very creative anymore. So, in a world of ad-tech, what place does creativity have at the table anymore? Creativity is […]

CANNES – Call it television, video or neither. What matters to ESPN’s Eric Johnson is that it delivers “value and impact” to advertisers. Like other attendees of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Johnson welcomed the many conversations about how the industry can come together and drive more effective ways of measurement. “We’re trading on […]

CANNES – In a world of seemingly endless video content choices, one thing is still missing: a better value exchange in which consumers realize that watching commercials might just be worth it. “I think it’s one of the things we’re kind of missing,” Dave Penski, CEO of Publicis Media Exchange Americas, says in this interview […]

CANNES – Expanding its premium video advocacy footprint beyond North America, FreeWheel debuted the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video Europe (FWCE) at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Right out of the gate, the FWCE garnered the support of the some of the biggest TV programmers and operators across the region. Initial FWCE members include […]

CANNES – Live streaming video is helping to break down the perceived barriers between traditional television and premium video, while OTT viewing continues to see tremendous growth, according to the latest FreeWheel Video Monetization Report (VMR). In this interview with Beet.TV, VMR author Ying Wang discusses the first quarter VMR findings, which show that premium […]

As it has for many decades, financial giant Bank of America will have a presence at this year’s UpFront. But having recently changed to a calendar year for planning purposes, BOA will be focused mainly on selecting the most appropriate publishing partners. BOA’s agency, Publicis GroupeConnect, decided that the UpFront planning model “just wasn’t suiting […]

Technology has done amazing things to create a variety of ways people can consume premium television content, helping to spark a “golden age” for content creators. But is the same technology and the data it enables encouraging the hyper targeting of audiences just because the capability exists? David Sable is quick to point out that […]

Having veered into negative territory over the past few years, the pendulum of industry discourse about digital video is swinging back to positive. And while there’s work to be done to streamline the planning and execution of premium video advertising, more marketers now have a deeper understanding of the benefits of being in its brand-safe […]

The latest FreeWheel Council for Premium Video position paper contains many insights and conclusions, one of which in particular stands out to James Rooke. When it comes to delivering optimal ad experiences across different screens, there is shared accountability and responsibility. “There was a clear understanding, based on the conversations that we had with brands […]

If you’ve ever dressed like a Ninja Turtle or a SpongeBob character, you know what it’s like to be a passionate fan of a television show. Viacom spends a lot of time studying what its fans do online and offline and uses the data to best connect them with brands. “Fans are at the heart […]

Lyle Schwartz isn’t known for sitting back and letting things happen at their own pace, particularly when it comes to television and video audience measurement. GroupM’s President of Investment for North America feels he’s at “the 50-yard line” in his company’s push for the industry to be able to measure commercial impressions across screens, despite […]

AT&T AdWorks chose to go vertical in 2017 with what it calls the industry’s first-ever Addressable Upfronts. Its 100 events across the country are tailored to specific industry product and service categories and clients with a focus on the attributes of both television and cross-platform addressable advertising. “Instead of a one-size-fits-all, one big event, we […]

Discovery Communications’ Discovery Engage audience targeting offering has been well received from a mix of product and service categories going into the 2017 TV Upfront. And the company is always open to new ways to standardize audience targeting beyond traditional age/sex demographic targets, says Ben Price, President of National Ad Sales. Having pushed its content […]

Every television advertiser is trying to identify what their specific audience means outside of broad age and sex demographic targets. While the latter represent a “fairly blunt instrument that we use as a currency,” more media owners are executing in ways that line up better with how buyers want to execute their plans. An audience […]

Supply and demand for television inventory is still a big part of conversations during the TV Upfront season, but it’s now accompanied by talk of OTT and VOD opportunities along with new transaction models like non age/sex audience targeting. When media agency Assembly talks with its clients, “These are all areas we feel are important […]

Having set aside $1 billion in inventory for non-Nielsen audience guarantees during this year’s TV Upfront, NBCUniversal has seen demand for its audience targeting products double year over year. Although it’s a big commitment, market dynamics are in the company’s favor. “The reason we’re continuing to be confident about increases in demand is because we’re seeing […]

Shortly before the 2017 TV Upfront began, Disney unified the way it sells ABC, Freeform and its Disney entertainment cable networks to advertisers. If only the advertising/media industry could coalesce around standardized cross-platform audience measurement. Like other media executives whose content is distributed on an ever-increasing number of platforms, Debra O’Connell “would like to see […]