FreeWheel is going agentic.
Today, the company built on its CES announcement by launching what it describes as its “new AI agent infrastructure” for “premium video.” It appears to lay the groundwork for a suite of agentic capabilities, ranging from spend and performance analysis to automated media buying and optimization.
At CES, NBCU, RPA, FreeWheel, and Newton ran a live experiment showing how AI agents could plan and optimize an NBCU campaign by talking directly to each other over MCP (Model Context Protocol), with human guardrails in place. This new announcement represents the next phase of that work.
With this launch, FreeWheel is starting to productize that architecture. The company introduced an MCP server that allows agency AI systems to plug directly into FreeWheel. It also includes built-in intelligence tools designed to automatically monitor deal performance and help keep campaigns optimized.
Why This Matters:
To truly scale as an agentic player, a company can’t be seen as just an operator. It needs an infrastructure layer that feels foundational and indispensable — the “agent rail,” if you will. We’re seeing that positioning emerge from companies like Yahoo DSP, which are presenting a broader vision than simply launching an agent.
By shipping MCP and Intelligence tools as products, FreeWheel is positioning itself as neutral infrastructure where buy-side and sell-side agents can meet, not just another adtech platform or SSP. That’s strategically important as “agentic age” narratives gain momentum. Other SSPs appear to be moving in a similar direction, including PubMatic.
Last thing – this is CTV-specific, obviously, given FreeWheel. That matters because CTV remains one of the most complex and fragmented areas of programmatic advertising. If agent-driven buying and optimization take hold, the platforms that control the underlying infrastructure in CTV are in a great position.
Experts React:
PMG has signed on for a pilot of FreeWheel’s new agentic offering.
In the announcement press release, Mike Treon, Head of CTV & Video Strategy at PMG, said:
“We are moving past manual setup to an era where teams use our industry-leading marketing operating system to optimize complex global deals instantly.”
Our Take:
Taking a step back, the bigger question is how much of the agentic pivot we’re seeing in adtech becomes reality versus experimentation. Agent-to-agent campaign management sounds compelling — and valuable — but it requires standardization, new levels of trust between platforms, and very clear guardrails around decision-making. Those pieces are still developing, but the industry appears to be moving in that direction and working to make it viable.
