FreeWheel Introduces New Solution to Enable Publishers to Unlock Faster Audience Activation Across Screens

FreeWheel, a global technology platform for the television advertising industry, today announced the launch of Audience Manager, a new solution integrated into the company’s TV Platform that enables publishers to unlock faster audience activation across screens.

Available now to the company’s publisher clients in the U.S., Audience Manager enables execution at scale by simplifying audience creation and targeting across screens, enhancing FreeWheel’s audience capabilities. Identity resolution within Audience Manager is powered by the FreeWheel Identity Network. The latter is the latest solution to stem from FreeWheel’s identity initiative, an effort to enhance ID interoperability and advance new capabilities for the premium TV ad ecosystem.

With these new capabilities, publishers can seamlessly tap into and activate data within FreeWheel’s TV Platform using third-party segments available through new partner integrations. The benefit is quick, easy access to audience data without the need for lengthy commercial negotiations and operational set-ups.

The new solution is built for speed, allowing publishers to activate audiences quicker by integrating, building, and forecasting audiences 66% faster than previous solutions, activating in under 24 hours. Real-time audience sizing provides visibility into the number of households and individuals, helping publishers respond to RFPs faster with scaled and curated audiences and to manage reach more effectively for advertisers.

Audience Manager has been adopted by 13 publishers to date – with more onboarding each month – and so far, audience matching has improved 3-4x compared to FreeWheel’s previous offering.

The solution comes at a timely point: As the TV ad landscape continues to fragment, advertisers and publishers have difficulty matching audiences and scaling campaigns on premium inventory across screens. By empowering publishers to build, manage and activate audiences using first-, second-, and third-party audience segments – all underpinned by the FreeWheel Identity Network – this new, built-for-TV solution enables quick audience activation at scale across screens and supply pools.

“Marketers increasingly want to reach more precise and addressable audiences on premium content. This, paired with the deprecation of cookies and third-party identifiers, means we need to build for the TV ad ecosystem of the future while innovating for the industry’s needs today,” said David Dworin, Chief Product Officer, FreeWheel. “The digitization of TV promises improved measurement and targeting capabilities, but there is still a need for real-time insights and interoperability. Audience Manager, powered by our FreeWheel Identity Network, helps solve for these challenges by bringing much needed advanced activation capabilities to our premium TV marketers and publishers.”

“Since adopting FreeWheel’s Audience Manager, we’ve been able to target our inventory with improved ingestion and activation speed,” said Seth Wernick, SVP, Revenue Operations, Crackle. “FreeWheel has made a significant impact on our audience-based campaigns as we look to reach consumers across today’s fragmented TV ad ecosystem.”

The introduction of Audience Manager builds towards FreeWheel’s vision for the premium TV ad ecosystem, which is to make TV work across the entire marketing funnel. As the company continues to expand addressable supply by growing participation in the FreeWheel Identity Network, adopting Audience Manager is the first step towards delivering consistent, cross-screen audience activations in a privacy-first manner. As part of that initiative, FreeWheel launched a new identity report this week to help buy- and sell-side customers navigate this increasingly complex topic.

About FreeWheel
FreeWheel 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 freewheel.com, and follow us on X and LinkedIn.