Disney Touts First-Party Data and Programmatic Enhancements in Upfront Kickoff

As upfront season begins, Disney wants to show brands that it not only has an enviable library of content and a massive audience, but the technology to ensure advertisers find the right audiences as efficiently as possible and can measure campaign performance better than anywhere else. To that end, the company held its second tech and data showcase this afternoon for marketers, following a week of announcements around the themes of data, automation and measurement, said Rita Ferro, Disney’s president of advertising sales and partnerships. The showcase is the first of four Disney upfront events this year, leading up to its first in-person upfront week presentation in three years, which will be held at New York’s Pier 36 on May 17. The emphasis on tech comes as Disney leans further into streaming, which currently makes 40% of its overall inventory. While connected TV is a growth area for marketers, several technological challenges around fraud, identifiers, frequency and measurement remain. Disney Picks New York’s Pier 36 for In-Person Upfront After Lincoln Center Exit Against this backdrop, Disney is working to address these concerns. Despite the challenges of programmatic in TV, its programmatic tool Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX) increased biddable transactions by 70% since its launch last year. And amid the struggles of targeting with third-party cookie depreciation, Disney has nearly doubled the number of audience segments to nearly 2,000 within its first-party data hub Disney Select. “We’re able to deliver those impressions and deliver the advertising message,” Ferro said. “[The showcase is] a report card on all the announcements we made.” First-party data solutions In a diminished targeting landscape, advertisers are scrambling to find ways to reach the right consumers. Disney is pitching itself as having a rich data library to meet this need. In its showcase presentation, Disney highlighted two examples of its first-party data platform, Disney Select, delivering results for clients. One home furnishing brand found that the platform drove nearly twice the awareness and 50% higher consideration than third-party data for the same campaign. In another example, Disney used its data to build an attribution model that powered a campaign for a quick service restaurant: consumers who saw that ad visited the restaurant 39% more than the unexposed group. The company is also touting its clean-room technology, giving it significant play in the upfront presentation, following a Wednesday announcement that is moving to the next phase, measurement, earlier than expected and will be working with Horizon Media on a measurement pilot test and is exploring new programmatic activation capabilities associated with the technology. Clean rooms allow brands to match their own first-party data with a media company like Disney, without revealing identities, thus executing on a privacy safe attribution solution. Automating ad-buying Disney also wants to make it easier to automate ad buying, aiming to automate 50% of its business in the next three years. Its programmatic exchange DRAX is a key lever to this. Disney used announcements this week and the showcase to show the progress the exchange has made in its first year of existence. DRAX has executed 8,000 campaigns in the past 12 months and announced this week that advertisers can now layer the exchange with Disney Selects audience segments. The company is expanding its Ad Manager tool to small and medium-sized agencies by the middle of this year. The tool, which started as Hulu Ad Manager, functions as a software-as-a-service type platform to help advertisers easily buy, measure and optimize campaigns. Disney says that over 75,000 businesses have used the platform, which has grown nine-fold in the past year. Improving conversions and measurement Measurement remains one of the biggest headaches in the connected TV space–as a morass of networks, third-parties and devices make it challenging to identify audiences without duplication and industry authority Nielsen has struggled to adapt to CTV. On Tuesday, Disney said it is partnering with Samba TV, Comscore and the new Nielsen One metric on measurement trials with Omnicom Media Group and Publicis Media, becoming the latest media company testing alternative currencies. Disney executives gave marketers some evidence of how these measurement solutions were working, including showing how Samba and Nielsen helped brands identify on which platforms consumers were viewing their ads and information about these audiences, like the fact that they watched less than three hours of TV a day. Another way to measure ad effectiveness is conversions, which Disney is hoping to drive through its commerce product GatewayGo. Executives used the showcase to give a progress report on the product, which lets advertisers offer phone and email promotions through TV ads. In the past year, Disney activated GatewayGo with 70 advertisers, including Smile Direct, who used it to increase email opt-ins 256% better than advertisers in a beta program. The company said consumers are enjoying the experience so far, touting statistics that 35% of viewers actively purchase from the living room and 82% of direct-to-consumer shoppers take action seeing an ad on streaming TV. Disney is also expanding commerce opportunities into movies and ESPN. “TV advertising needs to be full funnel medium,” said Jeremy Helfand, svp and head of advertising platforms at Disney.