Disney Shows Off Enhanced Programmatic, Addressable Platform Offerings Ahead of Upfront

For several years, media companies have paid lip service to increasing programmatic and addressability inventory in their upfront negotiations, but made little progress when it comes to actually transacting on those offerings. Disney, however, is serious about changing the way it does business with marketers, and it’s making a serious effort to expand its advanced advertising transactions in this year’s upfront. A year after it absorbed Hulu, the Disney ad sales team showed off its technology and innovation efforts—featuring enhanced programming and convergence platform offerings—to marketers in the first-ever Disney Platform Tech Showcase. It’s all part of the company’s efforts to convince buyers to devote more of their upfront budgets to Disney’s programmatic and addressable solutions. “This whole notion of demos and buying 18-49, that just doesn’t work anymore. We have to find a solution that actually enables every impression to matter more for [marketers],” said Rita Ferro, president of advertising sales and partnerships at Disney. “We wanted to make sure clients understood what were going to do to enable that across our platform.” The company’s ultimate goal: to develop “a global unified advertising platform, which will really allow advertisers to buy once and deliver everywhere across the Disney ecosystem, whether that's linear or digital or streaming,” said Jeremy Helfand, svp of advertising platforms for Disney media and entertainment distribution technology. This whole notion of demos and buying 18-49, that just doesn't work anymore. We have to find a solution that actually enables every impression to matter more for [marketers].Rita Ferro, president of advertising sales and partnerships, Disney By mounting its first-ever Tech Showcase, Disney wanted to get marketers on board now with its strategy instead of waiting until its annual upfront event in May. “Clients are asking us a lot of questions in terms of, 'How do I plan for Disney?'” said Lisa Valentino, evp of client solutions and addressable enablement. “You can’t accomplish that in 10 minutes in a May 18 upfront presentation.” The first step to convergence The showcase highlighted several of Disney’s new innovations over the past year, including Disney Hulu XP, which went wide in January after a limited rollout last October. In what the company called its first step to convergence, Disney Hulu XP allows advertisers to buy and manage inventory programmatically across Disney properties: streaming, sports, entertainment and news. The company rolled out two major new solutions as well. Disney Select is its new first-party data library using the Disney Audience Graph to combine its first-party data and advanced modeling capabilities to create 1,000 audience segments that marketers can buy against, including buyer behavior, household characteristics and psychographics. “In a cookie-less world, that is extremely important,” said Ferro. There’s also Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX), its premium video header bidder solution that establishes parity to all deal types and provides always-on access to inventory. DRAX is “unlocking programmatic for advertisers,” Helfand said. “That’s taking some of the programmatic capabilities from Hulu and extended that across all Disney endpoints.” Disney will put all its addressable inventory into DRAX this year. Changes in culture are “very difficult to plan for,” said Valentino. “DRAX allows you to access Disney and culture in a way that you never have been able to before.” The company also gave marketers a four-year roadmap of its plans to extend and expand Disney’s global unified platform features, including its GatewayGo transactional ad format, which originated on Hulu. Taking ‘the best of what we knew about Hulu’ Since Hulu moved under Ferro’s purview a year ago, her team’s focus “was really about taking the best of what we knew about Hulu and leveraging that across one technology stack that we wanted to build across linear, digital and streaming, to have the ability to move clients seamlessly around that,” said Ferro. Last June, that job went to Helfand, who previously headed up Hulu’s ad platforms and now leads Disney’s new Advertising Platforms team. Helfand and his team are focusing on four areas: automation (with a big programmatic push, including DRAX and Hulu’s self-service ad tool for small and medium-sized advertisers); addressability; accountability (creating measurement capabilities for all its objectives); and convergence. "Ultimately, to get to that vision of buy once and deliver everywhere, we've got to bring the linear and the addressable sides of the business together,” he said. The ad sales team anticipates an increase of more than 80% in automated revenue this year, and projects that programmatic sales will account for 50% of Disney’s linear and digital ad revenue by 2024. Disney is confident its efforts will pay off in this year’s upfront. Already in the past year, the company has had 1,000 new clients using programmatic channels buy across its platform. While Disney saw “some engagement around programmatic” in last year’s upfront, “we think there’s going to be a lot more committed dollars in this format” during this year’s negotiations, said Ferro. As the company grows its addressable footprint, “I fully believe that every advertiser that moves in that direction is going to be like, ‘Why didn’t I do this sooner?’” Last week’s Tech Showcase was the first part of Disney’s three-pronged upfront approach for marketers this year. The company will next hold its annual content development presentation on March 23, and led the charge in returning to the traditional upfronts week: Its virtual presentation is set for May 18 at 4 p.m.

TV Upfronts

Disney Shows Off Enhanced Programmatic, Addressable Platform Offerings Ahead of Upfront

Tech showcase for marketers touts evolution to unified advertising approach

Jason Lynch

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Jason Lynch