FreeWheel has introduced a major advancement for political advertisers by integrating leading voter and audience data providers directly into its streaming ad platform. Through new partnerships with Data Trust, L2, Resonate, and RevOptimal, buyers can now use FreeWheel’s Streaming Hub and Buyer Cloud to access rich, highly detailed audience segments built from geographic, demographic, voting, and behavioral data. This marks a significant step toward more precise political targeting across Connected TV, a category that continues to accelerate ahead of future election cycles.
The timing is strategic. Connected TV political ad spending is projected to reach two point five billion dollars for the twenty twenty six midterm elections, a one hundred twenty eight percent jump from twenty twenty two, making it the only medium that has consistently grown in political investment over the last two cycles. FreeWheel has already seen this surge firsthand, with programmatic CTV political demand rising six hundred three percent in the twenty twenty four election compared with twenty twenty.
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Soo Jin Oh, Chief Commercial Officer at FreeWheel, said the market’s shift creates new expectations for precision and real time flexibility. “As CTV plays an increasingly larger role in political advertising, buyers need more accurate audience data with access to diverse supply for an ‘in-the-moment’ ability to target audiences with the right message,” she said. “In a market that needs to move fast with ads that can change on a daily basis, only FreeWheel combines flexible options of integrated audience data with robust supply-side scale as the underlying advertising technology for many of the largest premium publishers.”
Through these integrations, political advertisers, agencies, media buyers, and advocacy organizations gain direct access to premium CTV inventory alongside deeply sourced, bipartisan voter data. This includes voter file information, issue-based attributes, consumer insights, behavioral indicators, and custom audience definitions that can be activated immediately across FreeWheel’s network.
The partnerships are drawing strong support from major media owners. “Political advertisers will demand both massive reach and pinpoint accuracy throughout next year’s midterms, and Scripps is committed to meeting that demand,” said Ahmad Jackson, Vice President of Political and Pay for Performance at Scripps. He noted that FreeWheel helps Scripps maximize the value of its extensive footprint in live sports, local news, and entertainment by giving campaigns sophisticated data-driven targeting tools.
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Data providers echoed how transformative the integrations will be. Jon Black, President and Chief Executive Officer at Data Trust, said, “Highly accurate voter data is the foundation of successful audience targeting on CTV. Through this partnership, Data Trust’s unparalleled arsenal of electoral data and other consumer data insights will enable our partners to reach the right voters where they are with unmatched precision across all channels in a multi-platform strategy.”
Paul Westcott, Executive Vice President at L2, emphasized the combination of speed and accuracy, calling it “the holy grail of scale, precision, and speed,” noting that L2’s frequently refreshed, nonpartisan voter file allows buyers to build real time segments and eliminate wasted impressions. Bob Brennan, Senior Vice President of Political and Advocacy Partnerships at Resonate, highlighted the importance of values based outreach, arguing that campaigns must connect with voters based on their priorities and lived experiences to feel personal rather than programmatic. Eric Slone, Chief Technology Officer at RevOptimal, added that deterministic audience data built on self-declared behaviors strengthens trust and accuracy, giving advertisers the ability to target based on motivations ranging from civic engagement to industry affiliations.
Together, FreeWheel and its new data partners aim to bring unprecedented relevance, scale, and precision to political CTV advertising at a moment when campaigns must move faster and target more intelligently than ever.
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