Exclusive: FreeWheel Launches Viewer Experience Lab to Create a Better Ad Environment

With the rise of AVODs and FAST channels, and the TV landscape changing more than ever before, it’s easy for the consumer experience to become lost in the shuffle. So in order to put that aspect of advertising front and center, ad-tech platform FreeWheel announced its new Viewer Experience Lab initiative today at Cannes.

“You start with the consumer. The consumer is the No. 1 thing for content creators because it’s how they monetize their business. It’s the No. 1 thing for the advertiser because it drives their business,” Mark McKee, general manager, FreeWheel, told Adweek. “The reach and relevancy of getting those messages out to those people has always been paramount in the advertising world. This is to help to continue to do that globally.”

The initiative, in partnership with media and advertising innovation company MediaScience, looks to help the TV industry improve the ad environment across video platforms throughout the growing array of traditional and emerging advertising channels that support premium content.

To address issues in the consumer experience and bring a best practices playbook to the marketplace, the Viewer Experience Lab will include an ongoing State of TV Advertising Viewer Experience Report, a commitment to ongoing research and continued innovation in FreeWheel’s suite of viewer experience products.

“It was one of those things where [we asked ourselves], ‘How do we help to bring a lot of the learnings that we have as a connector between buyers and sellers, and a connector across the ecosystem for premium video, to adapt to this new way of working?’” McKee said, noting that there are hundreds of endpoints where ads reach consumers and control gets lost along the way, leading to issues such as latency and ad repetition.

McKee told Adweek the company is looking to have a State of TV Advertising Viewer Experience Report coming out at least on a six-month rotation, and the initial report is a “starting point,” with stats he called eye-opening.

Among the findings: Nearly one-quarter of all streaming ad breaks (24%) last four minutes or longer, and 25% of avails are not filled on FAST channels.

“Whether you argue average consumers like advertising or not, what they don’t like is a weird experience,” McKee said. “There’s an expectation. And so when you see that, ‘We’ll be back in 10 seconds,’ that’s not the greatest user experience.”

In addition, FreeWheel told Adweek its quantifiable research will help advertising buyers and sellers understand the impact of different ad experiences on viewers and performance, including viewer response to new and evolving ad formats.

FreeWheel and MediaScience have already begun work on a custom analysis into viewing experience that will analyze consumers’ responses to stimuli in a lab environment and provide best practices for the industry, with initial findings expected in January 2024.

Premium partners

Additionally, the initiative will help develop solutions and interoperable technologies fueled by these new insights across the multiplatform, premium video ecosystem.

Innovation will also be informed by FreeWheel’s Council for Premium Video, with participating advisers including programmers and streaming-first companies such as A+E Networks, AMC, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal.

“The type of research initiative FreeWheel is spearheading comes at a perfect time in our industry, as programmers like AMC and others are trying to understand the best way to deliver advertising messages to viewers across a wide and fragmented distribution ecosystem,” Evan Adlman, evp, commercial sales and revenue operations, AMC Networks, told Adweek. “This research will deliver a broad overview of the consumer experience, so we can better optimize how we deliver advertising within our content.”

The initiative is just FreeWheel’s latest foray into the viewer experience realm. The company told Adweek it already provides publishers with several capabilities to enhance the viewer experience, including a system for dynamically adjusting the ad load based on time spent viewing, a dynamic ad scheduler for connected TV (CTV) environments and the ability to frequency cap across devices within the same household.

Regarding the new Viewer Experience Lab, McKee said the initiative is truly bringing findings throughout the ad ecosystem.

“The distribution and strategies for our clients are at a global scale,” McKee said. “And so the practices may be unique to different markets, but the concepts are certainly applicable to every market that is consuming content. And so all of those things are not just what we’re going to be doing in the U.S., but really it’s a global initiative.”