Dish Media, a leader in addressable advertising on a national basis, said it will employ a new technology platform from Comcast’s FreeWheel that handles both linear and addressable advertising, enabling the company to optimize campaigns against both types of inventory.
Dish is the first distributor to use the new FreeWheel technology, which makes it easier for advertisers to buy on traditional demos and audience-targeted household-level addressable spots together.
“A unified view of inventory allows us to help advertisers as they look to use TV’s full-funnel capabilities – everything from national linear to targeted, addressable,” said Kevin Arrix, senior VP at Dish Media Sales. “FreeWheel’s solution can help assure we have the inventory to meet both rating and impression goals, for linear and addressable, while also helping control reach and frequency, which translates to a better experience for the viewer.”
FreeWheel’s solution takes in a variety of inputs, such as inventory availability, viewership forecasts and sales order data, to help distributors manage their inventory and ensure advertisers are meeting their media goals.
Dish has been selling its addressable advertising both through direct sales and via programmatic auctions, making it a good candidate for the new technology, which Comcast is not yet using itself.
The new platform includes additional automation, reducing the need for manual analyses and data entry on a quarterly basis. It allows dynamic inventory decision making to happen even for orders that come in days before they’re scheduled to run.
“Making addressable advertising more viable is important to the industry. Distributors need to maximize inventory value, while also reducing manual workflow and improving operational workflows. This ensures marketers’ campaigns are optimally paced and reach their targeted audiences in the most efficient way possible. A unified approach to inventory management, including the growing number of addressable campaigns, is key to achieving this goal,” said FreeWheel general manager Dave Clark.
