Outcome-Based Optimization Is the Key to Unlocking CTV’s Full Potential

The connected TV advertising market is hurtling toward $30 billion, but the real opportunity doesn’t lay in scale alone – it’s in proving that ads actually work. That’s the thesis driving FreeWheel’s recent partnerships with Stagwell and Walmart Connect, both of which prioritize what the industry calls “outcome-based optimization” – the ability to tie advertising exposure directly to consumer actions, whether that’s purchasing a product, downloading an app, or simply remembering a brand. “What outcomes do when they’re tailored to specific advertisers is help lift the yield and CPM that a publisher can have in a way that buyers are okay with because it’s justified as a more efficient and opportune buy,” said Jon Mansell, VP of US revenue, demand at FreeWheel, in this video interview with Beet.TV. Stagwell partnership pushes curation to the edge FreeWheel’s partnership with Stagwell, announced in April, represents what Mansell described as “the innovative edge of what is happening in the agency business.” The collaboration integrates FreeWheel’s Curation Hub and Buyer Cloud into Stagwell’s media acquisition layer, giving the agency holding company direct access to premium video inventory. The arrangement allows Stagwell to aggregate publisher inventory and route it through whatever buying mechanism suits a given campaign. “They could buy it in any DSP or if they’re working through some sort of agentic activation plan, they can do that through this curation hub as well,” Mansell said. The emphasis on “proximity to inventory” happens amid a shift away from intermediary-heavy supply chains toward more direct relationships between buyers and sellers. For agencies, that proximity translates into greater transparency and, theoretically, better pricing. Walmart Connect brings retail data to the living room The Walmart Connect partnership operates on similar principles but adds a retail dimension that Mansell said publishers are eager to embrace. The retail media giant’s proprietary measurement capabilities allow advertisers—particularly those selling products through Walmart – to optimize campaigns based on actual purchase data. “One of the things that they’re able to bring into the CTV space that I think all publishers are really excited about is we need more outcome-based optimization,” Mansell said. The ability to connect ad exposure to sales data addresses a longstanding criticism of television advertising: that its effectiveness is difficult to prove. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has been pushing for standardized Conversion APIs to improve CTV measurement, acknowledging that ecosystem fragmentation and limited tracking identifiers have hampered advertisers’ ability to link impressions to outcomes. Retail media networks like Walmart Connect offer a workaround by providing closed-loop measurement within their own ecosystems. Premium signals find a home in programmatic Beyond outcome measurement, FreeWheel is working to translate traditional television buying criteria into programmatic signals. Metrics like ad load, co-viewing factors, and production quality – staples of upfront negotiations—have historically been absent from programmatic transactions. “As an ad server and an exchange, we are able to find a way to lift those metrics out of traditional buying and put them into the programmatic ecosystem so that a bidder can actually see them and optimize toward them,” Mansell said. The goal is to preserve the quality assurances that made premium television inventory valuable while enabling the efficiency of automated buying. This bridging function positions FreeWheel as what Mansell called a neutral party “sitting in the middle just holding the transaction.” Whether that neutrality holds as the company’s parent, Comcast, competes with other media giants remains an open question for some buyers.