How Placements AI is tapping into FreeWheel Partner Portal to bring their end-to-end sell-side workflow to more publishers
In this edition of our spotlight series highlighting the inaugural Partner Portal members, Neville Mitchell Sr. Director, Strategic Partnerships at FreeWheel and Mark Donohue, General Manager of Retail Media, at Placements AI discussed how the company’s integration is accelerating the speed in which it’s bringing their sell-side capabilities to market.
Can you briefly introduce your company and how you work with publishers/suppliers?
Mark Donohue:
Placements AI is an agentic-powered operating system of digital advertising. We work with publishers, broadcasters, and retail media networks to simplify and connect the ad sales lifecycle, from planning and proposal creation through trafficking, campaign optimization, billing, and reporting. Our solution AdSalesOS serves as an operational layer for managing ad sales workflows more efficiently. The result is faster sales cycles, fewer errors, and more revenue.
Why is integrating with FreeWheel via Partner Portal important, and what is the biggest benefit of having this centralized hub to manage how publishers access your capabilities?
Donohue:
For publishers, the biggest operational headache is fragmentation: data lives in one system, trafficking happens in another, billing reconciliation requires yet another tool, and the seams between them are where revenue gets lost and teams burn time on manual work.
FreeWheel’s Partner Portal directly addresses that by providing publishers access to advanced capabilities without leaving the platform. AdSalesOS connects bidirectionally with the FreeWheel ad server, so teams can plan, sell, execute, optimize, and invoice campaigns against their inventory, all from within AdSalesOS, with delivery data flowing back in real time. No manual exports, no reconciliation gymnastics, no revenue leakage from campaigns that fall through the cracks between systems. Publishers get the best of both platforms working together seamlessly.
What does this integration help your team unlock for publishers/suppliers?
Donohue:
Sales teams can build proposals that include FreeWheel inventory and get them out the door faster. AdSalesOS creates the deal in Streaming Hub, eliminating the manual re-entry that creates errors and delays. From there, delivery data flows back in real-time, so teams can monitor pacing, catch under-delivery before it becomes a problem, and take corrective action.
On the back end, billing and finance teams get the clean, reconciled data they need to invoice accurately and on time, because AdSalesOS automatically pulls actuals from FreeWheel rather than relying on someone to manually export and match line items.
Put simply, this integration helps publishers protect the revenue they have already booked, which is often just as valuable as winning new business.
How do you see our collaboration evolving — what kinds of new solutions or capabilities are you most excited to build with FreeWheel for publishers?
Donohue:
We take a customer-driven approach to our roadmap, so the features we build next will be shaped by what publishers tell us they need most through FreeWheel. That said, the direction is clear: deeper automation, richer data, and expanding the types of campaigns and targeting options that publishers can manage end-to-end within AdSalesOS.
Near term, we expect publishers to surface specific requests around additional targeting parameters, audience segmentation, and more granular pacing controls. Longer term, we see a real opportunity to bring more of the proposal-to-payment cycle into a single seamless experience, so that publishers can scale their business without scaling their operational headcount alongside it.
The FreeWheel partnership itself is the foundation. The more publishers use the integration and share feedback, the better we can prioritize capabilities that move the needle for them.
With the rapid adoption of AI, what advancements in media buying and ad management do you expect, and how will Partner Portal help your team adopt and scale innovations across publishers?
Donohue:
We are already living through a significant shift. AI is moving from a feature you toggle on to the operating layer underneath everything, and the publishers who adapt fastest will have a structural advantage.
In ad management specifically, we expect AI to dramatically compress the time between a campaign going off track and a corrective action being taken, from hours or days of manual monitoring to near-instant automated response. We also expect AI to change how proposals get built, with systems that can generate and price omnichannel media plans in seconds based on inventory availability, historical performance, and advertiser objectives, rather than requiring a planner to assemble them manually.
At Placements AI, we’ve built toward an agentic model where the platform does not just surface insights but takes action based on rules and AI judgment, not human intervention.
Partner Portal plays a key role in making sure those capabilities reach publishers at scale. Rather than each publisher navigating partner integrations independently, the portal provides a distribution channel for innovation, so when we ship new AI capabilities in AdSalesOS, FreeWheel publishers can access them within an ecosystem they already trust. That kind of reach matters when you are trying to move an industry forward, not just a single customer.
Explore what Partner Portal can do for your business today or learn how other partners are bringing their capabilities to market via Partner Portal.
