FreeWheel taps Nielsen DMP to scale advanced TV advertising
FreeWheel and Nieslen have expanded their partnership to include the measurement company's data management platform (DMP) in an effort to enhance targeting capabilities across advanced TV.
FreeWheel and Nielsen expand partnership
The integration leverages Nielsen's media and purchase segments, audience insights and segmentation to optimize campaigns in real-time on CTV, OTT and digital video channels.
FreeWheel Markets, a cross-platform monetization solution, will offer the Nielsen DMP through its Drive service, a suite of measurement tools FreeWheel launched in October 2018.
James Rothwell, vice-president of global agency, brand and industry relations at FreeWheel, said insufficient measurement is holding the industry back while consumers continue to dive into the space.
"Just by virtue of our footprint and the companies we work with, the scale that we can bring to an advertiser is pretty significant," Rothwell told The Drum. "It's hard as an advertiser because they've got to go to 10 different partners to create a national buy. That's increasingly easier through FreeWheel because we work with all those different companies and we can help create some efficiencies around accessing different inventory pools. And then you wrap that up with measurement capabilities – that's a game changer."
While Rothwell did recognize the value of partnering with Nielsen and its trove of insights, he added that FreeWheel works with a number of other measurement providers to gain a more holistic view of the TV spectrum.
"We know it's a mosaic of measurement that multiple partners will provide. We don't believe one single measurement partner will be able to solve this. Our platform is founded on the idea that we can incorporate multiple data sets from multiple measurement providers, and effectively let our clients choose who they want to work with. that's always been our philosophy on being an open platform and support what we think are going to be some of the major measurement initiatives," Rothwell said.
According to FreeWheel Markets general manager Neil Smith, this integration with the Nielsen DMP is a step toward FreeWheel's end goal of data unification across linear and digital TV.