CES 2025: Disney Talks Ad Tech, Ad Targeting, and Ad Buying
One common complaint about the ad industry is a lack of transparency about where you're buying and how it's measured. At CES 2025, Disney discussed their new global ad tech stack and how they're attempting to solve this problem and bring an easier and more understandable approach to ad buying.
"Disney is coming off a pivotal year," says Disney Chief Product and Technology Officer Adam Smith. "We've rolled out new machine learning and data-driven personalization platforms allowing us to dramatically advance the way we understand and organize Disney's one-of-a-kind library and the relationship viewers have with it."
The combination of this intelligence with the Disney unified identity platform they promise is providing better targeting for their advertisers. "What that means for our users," Smith says, "is that we will continue to drive more personal content recommendations, create richer discovery experiences, and deliver ads that are more resonant for our audiences."
Disney reported that their new global ad tech stack has delivered spots to 157 million global active ad viewers on Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. In the last twelve months, more than 200 brands have engaged and generated billions of impressions. The Disney Select AI engine which works in Disney's Clean Room ecosystem identifies lookalike audiences and allows brands to deliver sequential messaging to reach potential audiences without a lot of duplication.
The pending ESPN Flagship direct-to-consumer service will bring new inventory to market which Disney is counting on their advertisers will heavily invest in, as well as existing live events including NFL, NBA, college sports, ABC News, the Oscars, the Grammys, live concerts, and special events.
Generation Stream
Disney created Generation Stream, which they describe as a "thought leadership platform," to make their research available to buyers. "Before its launch five years ago, there was no single source offering a platform-agnostic, long-view look at consumer streaming behavior. Insights from Generation Stream inform and inspire Disney’s own innovation roadmap for advertisers," says Josh Mattison, EVP, Digital Revenue Pricing, Planning & Operations. "So what have we learned? People are watching more content when we offer it in a seamless, integrated experience. Offering content across multiple platforms is not cannibalizing viewership, it's expanding it."
More recently, he says, Disney has "commissioned our largest body of research to date. New insights coming from Generation Stream, exploring streaming behaviors and motivations around the world, show us that we are moving towards cross-cultural, global, streaming consumption."
International Audience Targets
"I’m happy to share that we’re adding new global Audience Segments representing unique streaming styles and emotional states across the globe, and they will be ready for activation soon," Mattison says. "So, for the world’s largest brands who connect with global audiences and need a holistic view of streaming today, there’s no better partner than Disney."
"We have introduced a wide variety of innovations to simplify the way that you and your brand engage with us, meeting you where you are in your data and measurement journey," says Dana McGraw, SVP, Data and Measurement Science, who keynoted Streaming Media Connect 2024. discussing how Disney leverages data science to empower advertisers. "Among those innovations have been our proprietary Audience Graph and Disney Select, our suite of advanced segmentation and targeting solutions which is scaling rapidly. Today, we are proud to announce that we are expanding these products globally into all markets where Disney+ is available. This fall we launched our Audience Graph and Disney Select segments in Latin America, and EMEA is next on the roadmap."
Disney advertisers will soon have access to four new, proprietary global audience segments with the descriptive names of Empathetic Escapists, Reflective Explorers, Social Shapers, and Comfort Connectors.
Live and Personalized
Disney is promising their ability to delivering millions of concurrent streams seamlessly will enable targeted advertising, instead of sending the same ad to all viewers. "Using the power of programmatic and real-time bidding to capture valuable live impressions, advertisers will be able to reach specific consumers with custom creative across tens of thousands of live games on the ESPN Platform," says Mattison. "This ad technology for live will be core to the launch of ESPN’s Flagship Direct to Consumer service later this year."
ESPN’s Direct-To-Consumer service will bring ESPN’s existing linear TV feeds to streaming, as well as ESPN+. "Within the ESPN App, when we launch our DTC service, we will also fully integrate features like betting, commerce and fantasy, while delivering a personalized SportsCenter experience, which for me will be an eclectic mix of Dodgers baseball, any college football, NCAA softball & baseball, the Boston Celtics, and the New York Rangers," says Mattison.
Disney is introducing biddable deals for live sports using Disney’s Ad Server, Google Display & Video 360, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo DSP will be the first demand-side platforms and Magnite as the only third-party supply-side partner at launch.
Opting in or Out?
At this year's event Disney actually managed to turn the hubris down a few notches compared to last year's session, after which I wanted to immediately go out and try to remove all my personal data from anything Disney touched, because as a consumer I was so offended by how they discussed their packages of their consumers' personal information. Consumer privacy and consent remain paramount issues where all of this targeted advertising is concerned.
This year I felt that while this was obviously a sales event, I was truly interested in trying and parse the insights I could from the presentation. However, like most ad tech and advertising talk, nothing is very straightforward, but it sounds like Disney's approach is becoming more transparent, which is a welcome development.
So, the upshot? Going forward, the mouse should be serving better targeted advertising and a better ad experience. If they can do all that and not make me want to go and opt out all of my data, then they are really onto something.
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