Press Release

FreeWheel and White Ops Expand Partnership Globally to Further Deepen Trust in Premium Video Inventory

April 29, 2020

New York – FreeWheel, A Comcast Company (Nasdaq: CMCSA), and White Ops, the global leader in bot mitigation and fraud protection, today announced the expansion of their partnership to include comprehensive pre-bid bot protection capabilities to protect advertising inventory within its ecosystem from fraudsters.

This enhancement enables programmatic impressions passing through FreeWheel platforms to be verified as human before any transaction is made. Ad inventory flowing through the FreeWheel system – at a rate of over one million ad decisions a second – will be verified across all platforms, including the emerging area of connected television (CTV). By adding the new pre-bid capabilities into the existing agreement, the two companies aim to further instill trust in premium inventory, enhance the volume of transactable impressions and continue to ease friction between buyers and sellers.

Sophisticated bots look and act like humans, live on consumer devices, and have user and device IDs, making them difficult to recognize and stop. Fraudsters are consistently looking to take advantage and FreeWheel and White Ops have partnered to provide an industry leading solution to address this problem. FreeWheel will use White Ops’s Advertising Integrity to determine real human users versus sophisticated bots pretending to be humans, even if it comes from the same device, while maintaining high-quality user experience for their premium TV clients.

“As an industry connector of buyers and sellers, building trust and transparency across all parties is our number one priority. Premium video requires an extra level of inventory quality assurance, which is why this enhanced partnership is so important,” said Jon Whitticom, Chief Product Officer at FreeWheel. “Our relationship with White Ops enhances our platforms to ensure that our clients can continue to detect, report on, and eliminate any fraud in their supply chain. FreeWheel is committed to ensuring clean inventory while also increasing the volume of transactable impressions. Combatting fraud at a global scale, an on-going battle, is the ultimate win-win for both sides of the ecosystem.”

“FreeWheel has been an outstanding partner of ours for several years, and we’re looking forward to where our partnership will go in the future,” said Tamer Hassan, Co-founder and CEO of White Ops. “Enabling Advertising Integrity’s pre-bid protection capabilities will solidify FreeWheel’s leadership among their partners as the industry leading provider of premium advertising management.”

White Ops today verifies more than one trillion interactions per week, working directly with the largest internet platforms, DSPs and exchanges. The technology uses a multilayered detection methodology to spot and stop sophisticated bots, incorporating technical evidence, continuous adaptation, machine learning and the Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team. As a result, White Ops Advertising Integrity blocks non-human traffic across all platforms, from desktop and mobile web to CTV and mobile app.

To learn more about Advertising Integrity, please visit: https://www.whiteops.com/products/advertising-integrity

About FreeWheel
FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, empowers all segments of The New TV Ecosystem. We are structured to provide the full breadth of solutions the advertising industry needs to achieve their goals. We provide the technology, data enablement, and convergent marketplaces required to ensure buyers and sellers can transact across all screens, across all data types, and all sales channels, in order to ensure the ultimate goal – results for marketers.

With offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Paris, Beijing, and across the globe, FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, stands to advocate for the entire industry through the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more information, please visit www.freewheel.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About White Ops
White Ops is the global leader in bot mitigation and fraud protection. We protect enterprises across the globe – including the largest internet platforms – from sophisticated bots by verifying the humanity of more than one trillion online interactions every week. The most sophisticated bots look and act like humans when they click on ads, visit websites, fill out forms, take over accounts, and commit payment fraud. We stop them. To learn more, visit www.whiteops.com.

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Media Contacts:
FreeWheel:
Elaine Wong, 929-388-9098
elaine_wong@comcast.com

White Ops:
Sarah Acker, 843-324-2900
sarah.acker@whiteops.com

MEDIA CONTACT