FreeWheel to Acquire Ad Tech Leader Beeswax

Acquisition will enable FreeWheel clients to participate more seamlessly in the growing programmatic TV ecosystem

FreeWheel announced that it has agreed to acquire Beeswax, a software as a service (SaaS) advertising company. The acquisition will expand FreeWheel’s current programmatic marketplace capabilities across all forms of television and video advertising, including Connected TV (CTV) and Set-top Box Video on Demand (STB VOD). This transaction is expected to close in January 2021, pending regulatory approvals. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Beeswax offers programmatic advertising capabilities through its unique Bidder-as-a-Service™ (Baas) customizable bidding stack, used by leading media companies and brands. This capability will complement FreeWheel’s existing technologies and add value to its current supply-side and demand-side clients. The exponential growth of programmatic transactions has driven a need for more customizable and flexible bidding technologies to serve a diversifying user base, including publishers who increasingly use programmatic technology to acquire incremental inventory and extend audience reach for their advertisers.

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“Together, FreeWheel and Beeswax can further enhance how television operates. As the ecosystem becomes increasingly complex, sellers and buyers of media want similar capabilities: great automation, simplicity, and the ability to manage data-driven campaigns across hundreds of endpoints. By incorporating Beeswax’s technology into FreeWheel’s offering, we can deliver even more value to clients of both companies, helping them better navigate and succeed in this new landscape,” said Dave Clark, General Manager, FreeWheel.

“The team at Beeswax has a well-earned reputation for innovation and technological leadership. We couldn’t be more excited about combining our efforts, visions, and roles in the ecosystem to build technology that provides television with the transformation it so eagerly awaits,” added Clark.

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Beeswax’s complementary capabilities will help expand and accelerate FreeWheel’s current programmatic technologies, improving FreeWheel’s clients’ abilities to trade inventory with automation. In particular, Beeswax’s bidding technology will allow for FreeWheel users to access broader pools of inventory to fulfill complex campaign requirements. This is important to FreeWheel clients across both the demand side and the supply side. Beeswax’s customers will benefit from the scale and expertise of FreeWheel within the video and CTV advertising sectors, while gaining the support, product investment, and technology leadership Freewheel provides.

“We’re looking forward to integrating our BaaS platform into FreeWheel’s global infrastructure to accelerate our vision of giving our customers greater flexibility, transparency, and control over their media buying,” said Ari Paparo, CEO, Beeswax. “Now, together with Freewheel, we can deliver scale across all programmatic channels, including advanced TV advertising.”

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