The Three S’s of Addressable, According to FreeWheel’s Stefan Maris

Stefan Maris, head of global partnerships and business development at FreeWheel, has identified three “key” themes to keep in mind when approaching addressable TV advertising. Maris shared those themes with us at CES recently, so we can pass them on to you.

So, what are these themes, and what’s their function in an addressable strategy?

1. Scale

2. Sophistication

3. Simplicity

Scale is easy: Through Project OAR, for example, FreeWheel and a partner like VIZIO can offer a huge number of eyeballs to advertisers, with each pair of eyeballs being addressable.

Sophistication and simplicity, though, are where it gets, well… complicated. “You can have all the addressable endpoints in the world, but if you don’t have a level of sophistication in your decision on top ot it, then there’s little value,” Maris said. That means the ability to adjust targeting and measure against specific KPIs.

Addressable sellers also have to make this sophisticated decision-making simple to execute. That can be hard, both on a purely technical level and a political level as the industry deals with privacy challenges.

Keeping these three s’s in mind is essential for all addressable stakeholders.

Here’s a transcript of TV[R]EV’s chat with Maris:

So, at FreeWheel, we looked at the addressable market, and we identified three key themes. So, one is scale, which we talked about. The other one is sophistication. And the third one is simplicity.

Now, I think one of the things that OAR can deliver, together with VIZIO in that partnership, is scale in the endpoints. Right? Because if you look through Smart TVs and the adoption of Smart TVs, there is a massive amount of growth there.

You can have all the addressable endpoints in the world, but if you don’t have a level of sophistication in your decision on top of it, then there’s little value.

So we spent a lot of time with all the partners in the industry to work through these challenges— across the technical challenges, the operational challenges, the privacy challenges, the business model challenges, and the measurement challenges—in order to kind of balance that, just to make sure that we can execute at scale but also look at unified reach.

FreeWheel solves complexity for our clients. We want to ensure for the agencies and the advertisers that they can transfer and transact with our publisher clients in an easy and simple way across all media inventory and at real scale.