FreeWheel, Comcast’s advertising business, has appointed Yuling Ma as its new chief technology officer.
Ma, who most recently served as senior vice president of engineering and general manager overseeing FreeWheel’s Beijing office, will be in charge of development and operation for FreeWheel’s technology platform and network operations. She’ll also oversee the company’s global engineering team across the United States, Europe and China.
“Since joining FreeWheel two years ago, Yuling has impressed us with her leadership and vision for how to best evolve the FreeWheel technology upon which our industry has come to depend. She brings deep experience leading world-class engineering teams and is the transformational leader our industry needs for its next phase of evolution,” said FreeWheel General Manager Dave Clark in a statement. “At FreeWheel, we are blessed to have a deep leadership bench with our engineering team, allowing us to continue to set the pace of innovation for our industry.”
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Ma joined FreeWheel from JD.com, a business-to-consumer e-commerce company in China, where she served as division head overseeing data products, platforms and business development.
FreeWheel is finding its new CTO shortly after acquiring Beeswax, a software as a service (SaaS) advertising company. The company intends to use Beeswax to expand its programmatic capabilities across TV and video advertising. The companies said that Beeswax’s bidding technology will allow for FreeWheel users to access broader pools of inventory to fulfill complex campaign requirements, and Beeswax's customers will benefit from the scale and expertise of FreeWheel within the video and connected TV advertising sectors.
About a year ago, FreeWheel launched a unified decisioning capability for buyers and sellers to transact across both direct sold and programmatic advertising. The capability was piloted in 2019 before becoming fully operational with more functionality.