FreeWheel and Adform Launch Programmatic Buying Initiative for Premium Video in Europe

FreeWheel, a Comcast Company and provider of the industry’s leading video advertising software, has today (13th May) announced an expansion of its European partnership with Adform, the integrated advertising platform. The partnership will make programmatic buying via their respective softwares easier – providing a superior customer experience and seamless buying process.

Combining the programmatic expertise of both parties will result in tailor-made demand-side platform (DSP) deals, with FreeWheel’s advanced video and connected TV (CTV) inventory accessed via Adform’s omni-channel DSP backed by Odin, the company’s advanced paid-media centric AI. By ensuring buys are co-curated, the interest of both publishers and buyers is taken into account, while providing advertisers with a trusted, consolidated solution offering the best of both branding and performance.

In the coming months the partnership will evolve to offer advertisers programmatic guaranteed trading opportunities. This partnership is tailored to providing an end-to-end overview of a campaign’s performance and ensuring the video buying experience is as smooth and transparent as possible for advertisers looking to invest in premium media inventory such as CTV, OTT, and Advanced TV.

With more than 20 years’ combined video advertising experience, FreeWheel and Adform will also establish a joint education programme consisting of workshops and webinars for advertisers and agencies to enhance their programmatic video buying skills.

Justin Beere, VP, DSP partnerships at FreeWheel, said: “The partnership will be the first of its kind to treat curated DSP deals packages with the same care as publisher-direct deals, and recognises the new role DSP partners are playing in the programmatic buying ecosystem. Investing in media automation has already been a huge success for us in the US, so it seemed natural for us to take this approach to the European market as well.”

Filippo Gramigna, VP global commercial partnerships at Adform, commented: “We’re very excited to improve even further our strategic partnership with Freewheel. Video continues to show high growth rates as brands are investing in this format that consumers love and consume across all channels. Now with CTV the opportunities are becoming even more interesting and that’s why it is so important to invest in additional education and curation in order to execute properly the campaigns and meet targets.”