How DanAds Integration with FreeWheel Aims to Help Global Publishers Grow at Scale
Continuing on our Partner Spotlight series, Samir Wadhawan, Executive Director, Product Management at FreeWheel sat down with Peo Persson, Co-founder and CCO at DanAds, to discuss how the integration with FreeWheel via Partner Portal will help bring their solutions to more premium publishers so they can unlock advertiser demand, protect pricing, and scale efficiently without adding operational complexity.
Can you briefly introduce your company and how you work with publishers/suppliers?
Peo Persson:
DanAds builds AI-powered advertising and order-management infrastructure for publishers, broadcasters, and media owners who want to move beyond legacy ad-sales models. For years, premium media monetization relied heavily on manual workflows, fragmented systems, and operational bottlenecks. That model is no longer scalable in a world driven by streaming, automation, and real-time demand.
DanAds helps the media industry to transform advertising into a more automated, self-serve, AI-scalable business while still maintaining control over inventory, pricing, and brand value. Today, we work with some of the world’s leading media across streaming, linear, digital, retail media, broadcasting, and DOOH.
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?
Persson:
The industry has spent too much time building disconnected point solutions around premium video and CTV.
What makes the FreeWheel Partner Portal so important is that it creates an ecosystem where ad-tech companies can work together and play to each other’s strengths. FreeWheel, as a foundational platform for the media industry, is fostering an environment where we can collaborate in a streamlined fashion, moving the industry forward as a whole.
For the media industry, the benefits are speed and interoperability. Instead of rebuilding connections and integrations market by market or partner by partner, FreeWheels clients can activate new capabilities and APIs faster, with less operational overhead and greater consistency.
It matters because streaming and CTV are scaling faster than the old operational models can keep pace with.
What does this integration help your team unlock for publishers/suppliers?
Persson:
This integration helps the media industry to unlock scalable, individualized self-serve monetization for premium video and CTV inventory without compromising control. The new portal automates and streamlines connections to FreeWheel’s infrastructure, replacing a manual management process for both DanAds and our clients.
Historically, self-serve was often associated with lower-value inventory or open marketplace dynamics. That perception is changing rapidly. Premium media now want the efficiency and scalability of automation while preserving direct relationships, pricing integrity, and premium buying experiences. Integrating through the Partner Portal helps make that possible at a much larger scale. It also reduces friction between sales, operations, and buying workflows, which is becoming critical as advertiser expectations become increasingly real-time
How do you see our collaboration evolving – what kinds of new solutions or capabilities are you most excited to build with FreeWheel for publishers?
Persson:
We believe the next phase of adtech will be defined less by isolated tools and more by intelligent ecosystems. The opportunity is not simply to automate existing workflows, but to fundamentally redesign how premium advertising is bought, packaged, optimized, and activated across streaming environments.
We’re particularly excited about AI-driven RFP workflow orchestration, agentic, smarter inventory packaging, predictive optimization, and conversational interfaces that reduce friction between buyers and premium media owners.
The future operating system for advertising will likely look far more autonomous than the industry is used to today.
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?
Persson:
AI is not just improving advertising workflows – it is redefining the role of ad operations entirely.
Over the next few years, we expect media buying to shift from campaign execution toward intelligent, always-on optimization systems powered by AI agents, predictive forecasting, and real-time decisioning.
Many of the manual tasks that currently slow down premium advertising – campaign setup, troubleshooting, inventory matching, first-party and third-party reporting, pacing, optimization – will increasingly become automated.
The challenge is that AI is only as powerful as the infrastructure it can access. That is where Partner Portal becomes strategically important. It creates a scalable, standardized environment for deploying AI-powered capabilities directly into the media ecosystems without endless custom integrations.
The media owners that succeed in the next era of streaming advertising will not simply have the best inventory – they will have the most intelligent infrastructure behind it.
Explore what Partner Portal can do for your business today. To see how other partners, like Watching That, are bringing their capabilities to market via Partner Portal, visit here.
