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.
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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.”
