FreeWheel brings biddable programmatic TV inventory to upfront with new tool

FreeWheel is testing a new tool with TV sellers that allows advertisers to include biddable programmatic inventory in their upfront buys, the Comcast-owned tech company announced today. As upfront buying has become more complex with the growth of streaming, the need for advertisers and agencies to be able to track spend across publishers and platforms has never been more critical. However, traditional TV upfront deals and modern programmatic practices have been slow to mesh. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Currently, direct deal making and programmatic guaranteed deals, or those negotiated on a fixed price and audience in advance, can be tracked through demand-side platforms. But biddable inventory, which is bought and sold in real time and can fluctuate in price, hasn’t been visible in the same way because of its in-the-moment nature. The “bidding algorithm” hasn’t been able to connect the dots between pre-negotiated budget allocations an advertiser and TV seller make during the upfront, and the money going toward a real-time bid, said David Dworin, chief product officer at FreeWheel. This has resulted in issues such as advertisers underspending or overspending with publishers due to the lack of visibility into biddable. “The programmatic ecosystem that we have today was built for display, and there’s a lot of challenges in how we shoehorn it into TV,” said Dworin. “The operational burden of getting [an advertiser] set up in traditional TV for a direct [deal with a publisher] is a lot higher than it is through programmatic. So this is all part of making more inventory available programmatically and making programmatic work better for TV.” FreeWheel’s Allocation Module seeks to solve part of this issue. The tool will allow buyers to track programmatic biddable ad spending alongside direct and programmatic guaranteed buys. It will provide alerts to publishers and advertisers on the performance of biddable buys to hold each side accountable for its commitments. Ad Age’s 2024 TV upfronts and NewFronts calendar Future-proofing the process Programmatic buying has ushered an era of change in TV buying—the time period for investing in TV inventory has expanded beyond the summer months following the traditional broadcast upfront week, and inventory is accessible year round at prices comparable to those obtained during upfront haggling, some buyers have said. And, as economic pressure on marketing budgets has particularly impacted the TV ad market, more agencies and their clients are looking to lean into tech capabilities for dealmaking. “As the offering continues to change—and it’s definitely changed a lot in the past few years—this idea of having an allocation or a commitment that an advertiser or an agency wants credit for across all different kinds of supply and transaction types, that’s really what we’re trying to solve and that we want fixed so that it future-proofs” the TV buying model, said Dworin. Read more: TV ad market predictions and ad tech capabilities The tool is rolling out for FreeWheel’s owned DSP Beeswax for testing in the 2024-2025 upfront and the ad tech company plans to roll it out to other platforms in the future. NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery and AMC Networks have signed on to participate in the initial tests. The Allocation Module “changes the way that we can do our deals in the upfront because we can continue to offer more and more opportunities for our advertisers to buy us programmatically,” said Evan Adlman, executive VP of commercial sales and revenue operations at AMC Networks. Last year, the cable TV programmer and FreeWheel partnered to open a portion of AMC’s linear TV inventory to biddable programmatic buying for the first time. Investments in programmatically transactable TV “help us enable advertisers to buy all of our inventory, whether linear or digital, through a single transaction,” said Adlman. “It breaks down and continues to help us break down that wall between the silos” of digital and linear media. Upfronts and NewFronts blog Tracking the latest TV and digital ad pitches Read more here

FreeWheel brings biddable programmatic TV inventory to upfront with new tool

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