Disney is betting it can woo buyers with programmatic and measurement.
At CES in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Disney announced the availability of combined Disney+ and Hulu ad campaigns for brands in the US during its fourth annual (and first in-person) Tech & Data Showcase.
Disney’s dog-and-pony show focused on four central themes – programmatic, data clean rooms, measurement and shoppable TV – but there was one main takeaway: Disney is courting advertisers and media buyers with everything it’s got.
The Mouse House first started beta testing the integration of Hulu content into the Disney+ platform in December, but the two services won’t become one until March.
Even so, although the beta only launched roughly a month ago, viewer engagement with Hulu content on Disney+ is growing weekly, said Joe Earley, president of Disney Entertainment’s direct-to-consumer business, speaking during Wednesday’s event.
Programmatic pillars
The first step to getting more brands to buy streaming inventory is making it easier to buy.
Disney shared that it now has integrations with 30 demand-side platforms so brands are able to access the same inventory programmatically as they can directly, according to Matthew Barnes, VP of programmatic sales.
Plugging into so many DSPs will help attract smaller and midsize advertisers that are just getting started with streaming, Barnes told press ahead of the showcase.
And Disney isn’t the only major streamer with that goal. On Tuesday, NBCUniversal touted its many DSP integrations as a way to court smaller brands to Peacock.
For smaller brands that prefer self-service, Disney also said Disney+ and ESPN+ inventory will be available to buy through Disney Campaign Manager soon (although it didn’t confirm an exact timeline). Until now, advertisers could only buy Hulu on a self-serve basis.
Data cleanup
Disney also hopes to win over new advertisers by giving them more ways to access its audience data, including through new clean room integrations with AWS and Google Cloud.
The Disney clean room, which launched in 2021, is already interoperable with Snowflake, Habu and InfoSum.
Advertisers that use AWS and Google Cloud can now match their first-party data with Disney’s identity graph to find the right ad inventory for their target audience.
Disney’s audience graph currently has 425 million unique identifiers covering 110 million households.
And for buyers who are less familiar with the inner workings of clean rooms, Disney also launched a new product called Disney Portal whereby advertisers can send their audience data straight to Disney through Habu.
Consider this Disney’s “first step toward a self-service clean room,” said Dana McGraw, SVP of audience modeling and data science at Disney Advertising.
Measurement for miles
But, you may be wondering, what about measurement? It wouldn’t be a CTV event without some measurement updates.
Disney announced new integrations with two measurement platforms. Lucid, owned by Cint, will help track upper-funnel metrics such as brand favorability and ad recall, and Innovid will help Disney measure business outcomes, such as conversions and sales.
Innovid also built a new measurement dashboard for Disney, now in beta, that advertisers will eventually be able to use to move ad budgets in real time to favor the best-performing creative based on conversions and other metrics.
Let’s go shopping
And last but not least, Disney had some updates on shoppable ad formats.
For example, Disney highlighted an ongoing beta test of what it calls Gateway Shop ads on Disney+. These ads, already available on Hulu, are 15- and 30-second spots that display more information about products within a video ad, including price. Viewers can choose to either scan a QR code or click on their remote to send product info straight to their mobile device without further interrupting their show.
Unilever will be one of the first advertisers to test the new ad unit, and Disney will make it more widely available throughout the year, starting with smart TVs (as opposed to mobile or desktop devices).
Even though many of these CES reveals are still in beta testing mode, Disney clearly already had the upfronts on its mind.
President of Advertising Sales Rita Ferro says Disney hopes its Tech & Data Showcase acts as a “compelling argument” for brands to earmark bigger ad budgets for Disney this year.
