If there’s one thing Disney knows how to do well, it’s brand building.
Now, it’s developing new tools to help its advertisers do the same.
The House of Mouse announced two new brand-focused updates to its data and measurement tool kit on Wednesday during its sixth annual Global Tech & Data Showcase at CES in Las Vegas.
First up, the Disney Compass, which launched last year to give advertisers faster access to data from both Disney and its measurement partners, is getting an upgrade. The new Brand Portal feature (launch date pending) will offer advertisers a unified view of their campaign results across all of Disney’s platforms, including metrics like category benchmarks and performance analytics.
Disney also introduced a new, rather aptly named measurement framework. The Disney Advertising Brand Impact Metric, as it’s called, aggregates several common outcome-based KPIs, such as attention, attribution and, of course, brand health.
The goal, according to Dana McGraw, Disney’s SVP of data and measurement science, is to “challenge the current standard” of performance analytics, particularly last-touch attribution.
“We know there is a halo effect to all of the advertising you do with us across all of our platforms,” McGraw told the crowd at CES. “The power of your partnership with Disney cannot be relegated to a single campaign.”
Be prepared
Last year, the beta version of Disney Compass was used to measure 100 billion impressions, according to McGraw. In fact, Disney even tapped the tool internally to manage its 70th anniversary campaign, which started in May 2025 and runs through August.
And because AI is still an attention-grabber, Compass will also add AI-powered summaries, as well as a chatbot known as “Compass Assistant” that marketers can prompt for audience insights and campaign info.
Disney is also developing an agentic “Ads Agent” to handle more complex planning. It takes creative briefs and generates full marketing plans, complete with core campaign objectives and target audience suggestions.
For the past decade, marketers have had to manually share “lots of information” with the sell side to efficiently buy inventory, Josh Mattison, Disney’s EVP of digital planning and operations, told AdExchanger on Tuesday before the showcase.
Once they’re fully operational, Mattison said, agentic tools like Disney’s planning agent are “going to take something that we do hundreds of thousands of times a year and make it a lot faster for marketers.”
A genie for your chargé d’affaires?
That newfound speed and ease could also help Disney attract more small and midsize brands – a key priority, Rita Ferro, Disney’s president of ad sales, shared with press during a fireside chat on Tuesday.
Disney is not alone in that ambition. Many others with streaming businesses are also chasing SMB dollars.
Automation certainly helps in this regard, said Ferro, particularly tools that “allow marketers to buy the way they want to,” whether directly through Disney or a demand-side partner.
And Disney is also borrowing from a now–familiar playbook by developing its own generative AI tool for creative, which happens to have the most self-referential name of all of its new offerings: the “Disney Experience Genie.”
After a marketer submits a creative brief, brand guidelines, product shots and logos, the “genie” comes back with storyboards. A dog food brand, for example, might get back options for what breed of dog to feature in the video creative. The tool then creates AI-generated commercials for CTV ad placements on Disney’s platforms.
This move shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given the recent trajectory of Disney’s generative AI policies. In December, it entered into a licensing agreement with OpenAI to allow Sora app users to create AI-generated content with Disney-branded characters. Some of that content may even make its way onto the Disney+ app’s forthcoming vertical video feed, albeit in a curated form.
In contrast to some of the criticisms leveled against Sora, Disney is taking a deliberate approach to its own generative video tools. In addition to developing guardrails for generative AI video ad creation, the product team is also working directly with advertisers to pinpoint their needs, Jamie Power, Disney’s SVP of addressable sales, told AdExchanger on Tuesday.
Ultimately, it’s Disney’s external clients and partners who will pass final judgement on the efficacy and value of these tools, according to Tony Donohue, the company’s EVP of ad platforms.
“I’m always quoting Peter Drucker,” he said. “‘Results only exist on the outside.’”
