Philo teams with FreeWheel, Roku and more for vMVPD advertising effort

Philo has announced a host of advertising sales and technology partnerships to help solidify the service’s place in the virtual MVPD marketplace.

Philo will work with Comcast’s FreeWheel for ad management, serving and decisioning and companies including Premion, Roku, SpotX, Telaria, FreeWheel, Xandr and Verizon Media to sell its live and video-on-demand ad inventory.

Philo and its partners will be looking to add automation to the ad-buying process and partner with supply-side platforms on integration with any connected TV plans. The company also wants to simplify the process to plan, execute and report on delivery, and deliver audience and behavioral targeting.

“At Philo, we built our TV streaming platform from the ground up to appeal to a new generation of TV lovers, and we have kept that same philosophy as we’ve built our ad platform: to appeal to brands looking for a frictionless advertising experience in a vMVPD world,” said Reed Barker, head of advertising at Philo, in a statement. “We’re partnering with best-in-class SSPs and DSPs, and we’ve aligned with content partners to provide a consistent, brand-safe programming environment. As a result, we’re able to offer an elegant, sophisticated advertising solution to agencies and brands to accompany a TV experience consumers love.”

RELATED: Deeper Dive—The co-viewing house that Philo built

Philo, which launched in 2017, is a $16-per-month livestreaming TV service focused on entertainment programming.

Barker said that VOD advertising on Philo has been available since March 2018 and that the company began inserting on linear inventory in June 2018. Like traditional MVPDs, Philo shares inventory with its programming partners. Barker said that in VOD it is a simple inventory share and on linear the company has the same local ad sales breaks (typically 2 minutes every hour) as any other MVPD.

Barker said that most networks insert only on VOD, where at the time of the ad call the back-end systems do a weighted coin flip to determine how many ad slots Philo has and how many the programmer has. The programmers and Philo separately sell their own inventory.

“Over the past six months, Philo has expanded its portfolio of demand partners (a list that keeps growing) to the partners listed in the release,” said Barker. “We have a blend of programmatic, reseller and some direct ad sales in our revenue mix.”