FreeWheel Introduces Programmatic Ad Buying to the 2024 Upfronts with Industry-First, Allocation Module Solution

FreeWheel, a global technology platform for the television advertising industry, announced the launch of a new solution that will change the way marketers plan and execute their programmatic TV ad buying.

The company is introducing this new industry offering, called Allocation Module, ahead of the 2024 upfront and NewFront season.

FreeWheel’s Allocation Module provides publishers with a holistic view of spending against upfront commitments, and offers demand side platforms a better way to gauge whether or not they are bidding enough, in real time, to meet their clients’ ad spend commitments. This new industry solution provides another key benefit: Marketers now have a way to better manage their committed ad spend across various ad channels.

FreeWheel is utilizing its buy-side platform, Beeswax, to enable the offering in time for execution during the 2024-25 industry upfront season, with plans to expand to additional DSPs in the future.

Allocation Module provides three core benefits, including:

• helping buyers and sellers holistically manage and pace their committed ad spend budgets across all transaction types, spanning direct, programmatic guaranteed and now biddable.
• expediting the shifting of premium, connected television ad dollars from direct to biddable ad transactions while maintaining dual sided guarantees
• empowering buyers via a DSP-agnostic application programming interface to streamline reporting and fulfillment of upfront ad spend.

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FreeWheel is launching this new solution in response to several current industry challenges, including the need for a simpler and more direct and efficient path to access TV ad inventory, and the operational burden of managing complex upfront agreements across multiple transaction types.

With this launch, advertisers and publishers now have a new method to manage the totality of their upfront video ad spend commitments across various transaction types, including, for the first time, biddable programmatic deals.

The latter is noteworthy and timely as advertisers increasingly want more flexibility in how they activate their upfront commitments. Similarly, publishers want guarantees that their valuable inventory will be monetized, regardless of the transaction method.

Prior to this solution, upfront or committed ad dollars allocated to biddable executions through private marketplaces (PMPs) between buyers and sellers could not be tracked or enforced, so it was more difficult to use as a part of upfront commitments.

“Existing systems have been holding back the modern day upfront. There has been an inherent conflict between the concept of upfront commitments and programmatic bidding, which happens in real time,” said David Dworin, Chief Product Officer, FreeWheel. “This new solution bridges that gap and has the potential to turbocharge the shift to programmatic as part of the next upfront.”

This solution benefits buyers and sellers alike. Publishers will be able to better track and manage upfront spend fulfillment from advertisers across delivery of all deal types. Advertisers will have improved transparency, communication and fulfillment of committed spend. They will also have increased availability of inventory for programmatic activation as publishers will have more confidence in that fulfillment.

SOURCE: Businesswire