How Swivel’s integration with FreeWheel helps publishers unlock operational efficiencies with AI
We’re continuing to showcase how inaugural Partner Portal members are using the hub to bring their capabilities to market. In this discussion, Tom St. John, Executive Director, Strategic Partnerships at FreeWheel and Frans Vermeulen, President at Swivel explored how the integration helps publishers tap into AI-powered tools to automate and optimize operations at scale.
Can you briefly introduce your company and how you work with publishers/suppliers?
Frans Vermeulen:
Swivel is the agentic orchestration system purpose-built for the sell side. We work with premium video publishers, broadcasters, and streaming platforms, focused specifically on their ad sales and ad operations teams.
Our platform translates operator intent into coordinated action: teams define the strategy, business rules, and guardrails, and Swivel’s agents handle the execution work that flows from those decisions. That includes the high-volume, repetitive tasks that need to happen continuously and precisely but don’t require human judgment at every step. The result is faster operations, fewer errors, and teams freed from being limited by an execution ceiling.
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?
Vermeulen:
FreeWheel is the epicenter of ad operations for premium video publishers. It’s where the operational decisions that drive publisher revenue happen. That’s exactly where Swivel needs to be to deliver real value, and Partner Portal is what makes that possible.
Rather than operating as a separate destination that publishers need to swivel-chair across, Swivel works directly within the FreeWheel environment they already use every day. The monetization signals, the inventory data, and the campaign context are all there, and Swivel’s agents can act on them without pulling publishers out of their workflow. This enables a shorter path from activation to impact, and capabilities that work harder because they’re connected to the systems that matter most.
What does this integration help your team unlock for publishers/suppliers?
Vermeulen:
The partnership brings agentic execution into the functions where ad ops and ad sales teams carry the most execution weight: Programmatic yield, direct campaign management, and trafficking. These are high-volume, pattern-driven workflows where errors accumulate quietly, and execution capacity has historically been the binding constraint. When agents are handling that work reliably and at scale, publisher teams stop operating in a reactive cycle and start operating with the forward visibility and strategic bandwidth that was previously out of reach. The stack gets more out of every signal, every campaign, every piece of inventory, because the gap between insight and action closes.
How do you see our collaboration evolving — what kinds of new solutions or capabilities are you most excited to build with FreeWheel for publishers?
Vermeulen:
The opportunity we’re most excited about is what becomes possible when publishers can act on everything they can already see. FreeWheel’s depth across premium video gives publishers not just an extraordinary view of their business, but a central operating layer for how monetization decisions get made and executed. Swivel’s agentic execution layer is what turns that visibility into operational response, at the speed and scale the market requires. As publishers grow more confident in what agents can handle, that combination compounds: custom monetization strategies executed with precision, new products launched faster, opportunities captured that execution capacity would have previously put out of reach. We see FreeWheel as a natural driver of that shift across the premium video ecosystem, and we’re building with that ambition in mind.
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?
Vermeulen:
Swivel’s view is that the industry is at an inflection point, and the publishers who move deliberately will define what the new operating standard looks like. As agents take on the execution work that follows predictable patterns, publisher teams become available for the decisions that actually require human judgment: strategic calls, client relationships, product thinking, the revenue growth initiatives where experience and context matter more than processing speed. Swivel is actively helping publishers make that transition, and the FreeWheel partnership is an important part of scaling it across the industry.
Partner Portal gives publishers a trusted path to execute agentically within the systems they already depend on, reducing friction and accelerating adoption. As agentic execution becomes a standard operating model for the sell side, publishers that embrace it early will be positioned to move faster, operate more efficiently, and capture more value from their existing teams and technology.
Explore what Partner Portal can do for your business today and learn how other partners, like Watching That and DanAds, are bringing their capabilities to market via Partner Portal.
