Publishers are publishers. They’re good at content, but, hey, sometimes they need help with adtech. Enter a new partnership between Comscore’s programmatic targeting division, Proximic, and Freewheel that will give FreeWheel video and CTV publishers access to Proximic’s tech and audience data.
Why This Matters:
On the tech side, FreeWheel customers using its ad management platform will get a boost in contextual capabilities, provided by Proximic. Proximic offers tools to extract contextual data points from a publisher’s addressable supply. These tools enable publishers to gain contextual content-level insights and map those back to IAB-defined categories. This allows for better contextual targeting and can also support a brand’s safety and suitability preferences and criteria. This helps publishers make their inventory more sellable, essentially, by having that identity-less, contextually-rich segmentation available, with the safety piece.
On the data side, FreeWheel publishers using Audience Manager, which has been around for about a year now and helps publishers tap in and activate third-party audience data, will have access to more than one thousand Proximic-supplied audience segments.
Proximic describes these segments as “privacy-resilient” and “ID-free.” The ID-free audience segments allow for ad-targeting without relying on traditional identifiers, like cookies. Proximic can do this by taking a seed set of consented data that it matches to Comscore panels, then applies AI magic. Like the contextual tech, this data helps publishers – especially those with limited authenticated traffic or internal demographic data – package their inventory better for monetization.
Experts React:
Proximic and FreeWheel have a big name onboard for the announcement, as well, with Paramount being the first to leverage the partnership.
“At Paramount, we are committed to providing best-in-class programmatic activation and making television a full-funnel performance vehicle for advertisers of all sizes,” said Paramount’s SVP of Advertising, Leo O’Connor. “Comscore’s ID-free audience data expands our targeting capabilities… to include interest and intent signals, providing more flexibility and choice for advertisers looking to activate scalable audience buys across Paramount’s massive domestic and international digital content portfolio in a privacy-sensitive manner.”
The capabilities will be available to additional video publishers later this year. (It should also be noted that the tech and data capabilities Paramount will use will support its own advertisers through the company’s EyeQ Select platform, which makes it easier for buyers to activate campaigns across the entirety of Paramount’s ad-supported content library.)
Our Take:
Proximic has been making some noise around its contextual capabilities this year. Earlier this month, Horizon Media tapped them to be their preferred contextual intelligence vendor. Proximic has really been all in contextual, a space that is increasingly hot as DSPs, ID players, verification companies, publishers, and others all vie for business. It will be interesting to see if this focus shifts at all, especially with cookie deprecation not as central of an issue following Google’s recent change of heart and deprecation deadline pullback.
