Table of Contents
Overview
The FreeWheel Identity Network is a comprehensive and robust identity solution designed to enhance audience targeting, measurement, and activation across multiple screens. It combines leading identity solutions with first-party identity data, creating seamless interoperability within FreeWheel’s TV Platform and Beeswax products. It powers real-time identity resolution, allowing clients to connect and identify users and households across various devices and platforms, ensuring privacy and security throughout the process.
The FreeWheel Identity Network consists of two primary components:
Core Graph: A privacy-compliant, personally identifiable information (PII)-anchored identity graph that enables real-time identification and connection of users across devices, distributors, and identifiers. This ensures that publishers can accurately identify and target their audiences in a secure environment.
Customized Graph: A customizable extension of the Core Graph that allows clients to integrate their own first-party identifiers for more unified planning, audience targeting, and measurement. The core graph becomes the customized graph once first-party or second-party ID's are onboarded to it.
Additionally, first party permissioning provides a privacy-safe mechanism for sharing first-party data with trusted partners, allowing for 1:1 or 1-to-many sharing of IDs to enhance collaboration and targeting capabilities. Together, these components create an efficient and scalable system where buyers can receive permissions from the publisher partners to enable unified and deterministic audience targeting, optimization, and measurement. This simplified process ultimately benefits both sides by enhancing monetization opportunities and improving the effectiveness of advertising efforts.
The FreeWheel Core Graph and Customized Graph
Core Graph
The Core Graph is a PII-driven graph that enables real-time identity resolution, allowing publishers to securely identify and connect with users and households across various devices. One of its key differentiators is scale, as it powers high-quality match rates across premium inventory, encompassing more than three billion endpoints.
FreeWheel has partnerships with TransUnion, LiveRamp, Block Graph, and Experian, resulting in over 500 million universal IDs. It also maintains billions of identifiers tied to individuals. The Core Graph unifies IDs such as mobile IDs, browser cookies, IP addresses, hashed emails, and phone numbers. Incoming requests are matched to individual or household levels within the FreeWheel Identity Network, connecting IDs and improving inventory match rates with higher fidelity.
Customized Graph
The Customized Graph is a key feature of the Identity Network, offering a flexible extension of the Core Graph that allows clients to integrate their own first-party identifiers for more unified audience targeting, planning, and measurement. The Customized Graph capabilities enable the onboarding of first-party IDs directly into the FreeWheel Identity Network, ensuring secure and privacy-compliant use of this data.
For buyers, the Customized Graph also supports the secure, privacy-safe receipt of first-party IDs from trusted publisher partners. Once permissioned, these IDs become part of the extended FreeWheel Identity Network, allowing receiving clients to unify all ID types across various use cases. By keeping identity data within the FreeWheel platforms, the Customized Graph ensures protection against data leakage, while still providing buyers with the insights needed to make informed purchasing decisions. This approach allows buyers to access valuable data to optimize and validate advertising spend, without compromising on privacy or exposing sensitive identity information
How it Works
The onboarding process begins when a secure, encrypted mapping file is shared with FreeWheel. This file is used to add a first-party ID to the FreeWheel Identity Network using a common key, which links the new ID to one that FreeWheel already recognizes. Once the mapping is established, it allows FreeWheel to translate IDs within the network. The mapping file is only used for incorporating the first-party ID, and any future use of that ID will be within the FreeWheel Identity Network.
There are two options for onboarding a first-party ID:
Onboard via Partner ID – A mapping file linking the first-party ID to a partner ID recognized by FreeWheel can be sent directly to FreeWheel’s S3.
Onboard via PII – A mapping file linking the first-party ID to PII fields accepted by FreeWheel can be submitted to FreeWheel’s S3.
Once onboarded, first-party IDs can be permissioned to partners on TV Platform or Beeswax using Access Manager. Permissions can be set for specific time periods. See Onboarding First-Party ID's for more information.