Ad Tech Briefing: Meta and Pinterest showcase CTV possibilities at ad tech’s Miami jamboree

Then there’s Comcast-owned FreeWheel, which recently announced its Partner Portal, with companies including DanAds and Swivel, to further woo marketers, both small and large, toward its sprawling suite of ad tech services.

Across the industry, large platforms are converging on a similar strategy — extending performance advertising capabilities, long honed in mobile and social environments, into CTV. The aim is to unlock a new pool of demand by making television inventory more accessible, measurable, and, crucially, usable for the long tail of advertisers that have historically been priced out or operationally excluded.

Meta is one of the most prominent examples. While its CTV ambitions remain unconfirmed, multiple sources indicate it has spent more than a year exploring how to plug its demand into existing CTV supply infrastructure. Conversations with supply-side platforms and ad servers suggest a partnership-led approach — one that mirrors its earlier audience-extension playbook.

The logic is straightforward. Meta already commands a vast base of SMB advertisers, the majority of whom are accustomed to self-serve tools, deterministic targeting, and performance-based outcomes. Extending those capabilities into CTV would allow it to utilize budgets that have traditionally flowed into brand-led TV campaigns, while reinforcing its position against rivals such as Amazon and Google.

Pinterest is following a similar path, albeit with a more defined product. Its recent activation of tvScientific enables advertisers to target its audience segments across third-party CTV inventory — effectively exporting its performance advertising model beyond its owned-and-operated environment.

The move reflects a broader shift in the market. A cohort of performance-focused CTV companies has emerged to serve SMB and mid-market advertisers that prioritize attribution over reach. By acquiring tvScientific, Pinterest gains a ready-made pathway into that segment, combining its first-party data with infrastructure designed to deliver measurable outcomes across screens.

In both cases, the strategy hinges on lowering the barriers to entry for smaller advertisers. CTV has long been constrained by complex workflows, fragmented supply paths, and limited measurement capabilities — factors that have historically favored large, agency-led buyers. Simplifying those dynamics is key to unlocking incremental demand.

Max Willens, principal analyst at eMarketer — the analyst firm that forecast Meta would overtake Google as the world’s largest media outfit this year — told Digiday that Meta’s scale and advertiser base make it a strong contender in the CTV market.

However, it may require a different approach than its current simplified monetization strategy, not to mention better governance of inventory supply, an issue that caused earlier iterations of its audience extension efforts to come awry. “As far as the attractiveness to advertisers, I could see this performing very, very well,” added Willens, a former Digiday journalist.

It’s also worth noting that enabling that shift requires changes to the underlying infrastructure, with FreeWheel — arguably Comcast’s most well-known advertising entity brand — similarly moving to construct a setup that can facilitate working with third parties at scale.

On April 22, the Comcast-owned ad tech platform launched Partner Portal, a centralized hub designed to let third-party vendors build, test, and deploy applications directly within its streaming ad ecosystem. 

At a functional level, the offering aims to reduce the need for bespoke integrations by allowing partners to access FreeWheel’s APIs, experiment in sandbox environments, and scale tools across multiple publishers through a single interface. The initial use cases are operational — campaign management, pacing, troubleshooting, and analytics — rather than the more advanced AI capabilities referenced in its positioning.

By enabling partners to “build once, deploy broadly,” FreeWheel is positioning itself as a foundational layer in the CTV ecosystem — one that sits between supply and the growing array of tools designed to activate demand. In doing so, it mirrors the broader industry shift toward platformization, where value accrues not just from owning media or demand, but from controlling the environment in which they interact.

Ultimately, the long-term goal is for FreeWheel to offer a system that third parties can integrate with, and then to enable a proliferation of agents within the FreeWheel cloud — a vision similar to the one outlined by Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale when he formally unveiled this past week.

Similar to the simultaneous CTV projects being rolled out by Meta and Pinterest, this has direct implications for SMB-driven growth. The similarity between all three behemoths is that they rely on access to scaled, standardized supply, with infrastructure providers, in turn, incentivized to make that supply easier to access, integrate, and optimize against — particularly for partners building self-serve or automated buying tools.

FreeWheel’s Partner Portal can be viewed through that lens: an attempt to make premium CTV inventory more interoperable without relinquishing control. Publishers retain permissioning and governance, while partners gain a more efficient route to market.

The convergence of these dynamics points to a broader realignment in how TV advertising is bought and sold.

Large platforms are seeking to port their demand advantages — data, automation, and SMB reach — into new environments. Meanwhile, infrastructure providers are adapting their systems to accommodate a more diverse and performance-oriented buyer base.

Whether that ultimately democratizes CTV or simply reshapes existing power dynamics remains an open question. But the direction of travel is increasingly clear: the next wave of growth in streaming advertising will not be driven solely by big-brand budgets, but by the industry’s ability to make television work like the rest of the internet.

What we’ve heard

“POSSIBLE is a stupid conference, but you have to be there because everyone else is there. Cannes, at least, has an awards show.”

– One unnamed attendee of this week’s POSSIBLE conference, hosted in Miami, FL., sounds off.

Numbers to know

StackAdapt released its State of Programmatic Advertising 2026 report, based on insights from 484 senior marketers across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., plus platform data from 6,000+ global advertisers.

• 4X: Top marketers are 4X more likely to consolidate their ad tech by 2027
• 75%: The number of marketers who expect their budget to grow
• 84%: Expect stronger year-over-year performance-orientated campaigns

What we’ve covered

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Marketers join OpenAI’s ad pilot, nudged by FOMO

OpenAI’s ad pilot may be the industry’s latest shiny object. But weeks into the offering going live, it’s unclear if the tech company’s ad platform offers real value to marketers — or whether they’re participating out of FOMO (fear of missing out).

What we’re reading

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StackAdapt’s playbook for ChatGPT ads

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FBI is buying data that can be used to track people

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