FreeWheel Launches New Enhanced Unified Yield Industry Capability

This new, improved capability unifies sales channels by boosting programmatic demand to compete with guaranteed placements, all without risking delivery on ad commitments.

Key benefits include greater revenue maximization for publishers while unlocking previously inaccessible premium inventory for advertisers.

FreeWheel today announced an important enhancement to its premium programmatic industry suite of offerings, namely a new, unified yield set of capabilities for publishers.

One noteworthy distinction of this newly improved offering is its ability to give non-guaranteed, programmatic demand the opportunity to compete with “healthy,” direct sold guaranteed deals.

This enhancement is timely for several reasons. Per the latest and inaugural Comcast Advertising report, programmatic ad growth has risen 80% year over year as marketers increasingly adopt the medium as a way to reach specific audiences more efficiently. As such, publishers need tools that can help them better incorporate non-guaranteed, programmatic demand into their monetization strategy. The challenge, however, is that they also need to be to do this by honoring guaranteed advertisers’ commitments, such as upfront buys.

As such, FreeWheel created this new, enhanced offering to address many of these industry trends and needs. Premium video, in particular, provides high value audiences for advertisers, but currently exists in a limited supply. Additionally, balancing yield management across guaranteed and programmatic demand channels is currently a manual and cumbersome process. Case in point: Publishers need a way to maximize the value of each impression, without putting their guaranteed business at risk.

FreeWheel’s enhanced, unified yield capability protects the value of high quality, premium video while automating yield optimization. As a result, publishers have greater control over which types of demand are opted in, while providing full transparency and reporting to revenue opportunities.

Another core and valuable feature of this new tool is its ability to give publishers another way to access premium, hard-to-obtain inventory that is normally unavailable due to direct sales commitments. While advertisers may have been previously challenged in accessing this inventory, by boosting programmatic demand, FreeWheel provides marketers with additional opportunities to reach their target audiences at scale.

“We developed this new, improved industry solution to help solve for and reduce some of the friction and inefficiencies in the TV ad buying process across sales channels,” said Katy Loria, Chief Revenue Officer, FreeWheel. “FreeWheel’s new unified yield capability provides smarter demand decisioning so that we can help deliver better results for marketers and publishers, while honoring guaranteed commitments.”

A+E Networks is one media leader that has adopted FreeWheel’s unified yield solution and seen positive results, including a +35% increase in cost per thousand (CPM) across replaced impressions, while all guaranteed deals still delivered in full during this period.

“One of the beneficial features about FreeWheel’s new unified yield offering is the technology’s ability to balance an increasing demand for non-guaranteed, programmatic while fully delivering on our commitments to our advertiser partners,” said Tyler Denicola, Vice President, Programmatic Revenue & Partnerships, A+E Networks. “In doing so, we’ve been able to create more flexible opportunities for our advertisers to unlock new audiences across our premium video portfolio.”

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 Twitter and LinkedIn.