Why Watching That Is Integrating with FreeWheel to Give Publishers Operational Visibility at Scale
As streaming workflows grow more complex, the pressure on publisher ad stacks is rising fast, requiring more data inputs, more decisioning, more automation, and higher expectations for transparency and control. Yet innovation can stall when partner integrations are one-off, onboarding is fragmented, and new capabilities can’t scale easily across premium streaming environments.
Open platform strategies use governed APIs to enable secure, standardized integrations without compromising publisher control. By exposing core services and testing environments, they let partners build specialized solutions without adding complexity.
Last month, FreeWheel advanced its open platform strategy by announcing Partner Portal—a centralized hub where partners can build once and deploy broadly. By building on FreeWheel’s infrastructure, partners can deliver tailored solutions for modern publishers quickly and securely, accelerating innovation without added complexity.
Throughout the upcoming weeks, we’ll be highlighting several inaugural members of Partner Portal to spotlight the capabilities they are bringing to market. In this first edition, Gil Sommer, VP, Product Management at FreeWheel recently sat down with Cameron Church, CEO and Founder at Watching That, to discuss their new integration with FreeWheel via the Partner Portal, what this unlocks for their business and for publishers, what becomes possible when integrations are easier to test and scale, and how media owners can adopt new capabilities faster while keeping the trust, permissions, and operational rigor premium TV requires.
Can you briefly introduce your company and how you work with publishers/suppliers?
Cameron Church:
Watching That is an operations control platform for streaming and digital media advertising. We connect to all the systems in a publisher’s ad stack: FreeWheel, SSPs, header bidders, decisioning layers, configuration APIs, distribution partners. Watching That connects these disparate systems, and, from there, our customers get four things they use day-to-day: continuous reporting, deep analysis, deterministic monitoring and inspection across every campaign and creative.
Whether they’re broadcasters, streamers, FAST operators or digital publishers, the teams we work with share one problem. They’re accountable for revenue leakage and delivery failures, and each platform only sees its own slice (ad server, header bidder, reconciliation tool, distribution partner). The answers ops leaders actually need almost always live in the gaps between them. Watching That works in the gaps.
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?
Church:
Partner Portal closes a gap that’s been widening for years. According to eMarketer, US connected TV advertising will reach approximately $38 billion in 2026. It’s set to surpass linear TV for the first time in 2028, at which point CTV ad spend hits $46.89 billion. That spend flows through stacks where each publisher has stitched together a dozen or more vendors: header bidders, decisioning, monitoring, analytics, automation. The integration burden has historically landed on ad operations teams without spare cycles.
The biggest benefit is time, and time has a literal dollar value in this business. Large broadcasters now quantify the cost of slow incident detection in tens of thousands of dollars per hour, with leading teams setting mean-time-to-detect targets in single-digit minutes. That’s operational reality at scale. Every week shaved off vendor evaluation, integration and onboarding is real revenue protected. A centralized, validated catalogue of FreeWheel partners compresses cycles that used to run for months into days. Technical activation itself drops to minutes.
What does this integration help your team unlock for publishers/suppliers?
Church:
Speed and depth.
Speed: A FreeWheel publisher can connect Watching That through Partner Portal in minutes to hours. A traditional integration would take days. Full vendor onboarding outside Partner Portal can stretch into months.
Depth comes in two layers. First, the data: we work across FreeWheel’s full surface and APIs so customers see the entire path from auction to delivery rather than just a slice of it. Second, the monitoring: we run two complementary engines on top of that data. Validation Monitors catch the things that have been defined as wrong: geo-targeting mismatches, naming convention breaches, age-restriction violations, pacing failures. These are the deterministic checks that should never fail but do. Anomaly Detection catches the things you didn’t know to look for: a flatline on one distribution endpoint, fill rate quietly collapsing on a single device family, a creative serving but not rendering. Together they cover both the known knowns and the unknown unknowns.
But spotting an anomaly is only step one. The work that actually closes the loop is root cause analysis, which often means tracing across the stack alongside the workflows and visibility teams already have within platforms like FreeWheel. An alert that fill rate has dropped on a specific CTV platform begins in the platform, but understanding the full picture can also involve correlating SSP activity, creative validation, and downstream delivery signals. Watching That helps bring these inputs together to support faster root cause analysis across complex environments, so ops teams know what to fix, complementing the control publishers rely on with FreeWheel.
One broadcaster customer caught nearly 850,000 lost impressions on a single distribution partner before their own internal monitoring flagged it. That’s what the combination makes possible.
How do you see our collaboration evolving — what kinds of new solutions or capabilities are you most excited to build with FreeWheel for publishers?
Church:
The most exciting work ahead with FreeWheel sits on top of what we call the Context Graph. It’s the proprietary architecture at the heart of how Watching That sees a publisher’s stack.
The Context Graph is precisely what the name suggests: a live, queryable model of every system in the publisher’s operational chain and every meaningful relationship between them. FreeWheel sits inside it. SSPs sit inside it. Each system in the stack is a node: header bidders, decisioning, distribution partners, content management, configuration APIs. Each operational relationship between them is an edge. It’s the structure that lets us answer the questions ops leaders ask in real time:
Why is this advertiser underdelivering? Which partner platform is dropping ad breaks? Where’s the $40,000 that didn’t show up in last month’s reconciliation?
Those are stack-spanning questions, the answers live in the relationships between platforms. The Context Graph is what makes those relationships visible, queryable and traceable in seconds. It is also the precondition for almost everything operations leaders want to do next, including the agentic AI workflows the industry is racing to build. Agents cannot reason intelligently across data that hasn’t been placed in context first.
Our most ambitious work with FreeWheel is around going deeper into the FreeWheel surface while extending the Context Graph across the rest of the publisher’s stack. That combination is where operations control becomes operations intelligence. It’s where the next chapter starts.
With the rapid adoption of AI, what advancements in operations do you anticipate, and how will Partner Portal enable your team to innovate and keep pace?
Church:
A genuine wave of agentic AI work is underway across ad operations right now. Initiatives, experiments, prototypes everywhere. It’s an exciting moment for the industry. The teams getting it right are building on platforms that can actually feed an agent the contextual data it needs to reason: granular logs, real-time bid signals, configuration state, partner-level performance. FreeWheel will be a foundational platform in this new era for exactly that reason. The depth of data it exposes (ad-level logs, bid-level logs, configuration and reporting APIs) is precisely what agentic systems need to be useful rather than decorative.
Watching That’s contribution is one expression of what becomes possible on that foundation. Our MCP server, shipping now, lets an ops team point Claude, ChatGPT or their own LLM at the Watching That operations control platform and query the Context Graph in natural language. “How are my advertisers bidding today?” returns a real, sourced answer in 30 seconds, pulling from every system in the stack. It’s the early shape of operational intelligence in the agentic era: less hunting through dashboards, more conversation with a system that has the full picture.
Partner Portal accelerates this. Every new publisher connecting through it gets the integrated foundation that agentic tooling needs. You can’t put a competent agent on top of disconnected systems and expect coherent reasoning. You can put one on top of a unified operational picture. That’s Partner Portal’s quiet but real contribution to what comes next. The ops teams already thinking in those terms are putting the foundations in place now.
Watching That is leveraging FreeWheel Partner Portal to help unlock how publishers can gain access to their platform to obtain real insight and control over their revenue. Want to explore what Partner Portal can do for your business? Learn more or request access at freewheel.com/partnerportal.
