The Walt Disney Company intends to automate 75% of its advertising operations by 2027. In this year’s annual TV and streaming advertising upfront market, the firm went a step closer to achieving its goal.
“Of the streaming dollars that came in, of those billions of dollars, more than half of them are transacted programmatically,” Disney’s senior vice president of addressable sales Jamie Power stated on stage during the Digiday Publishing Summit in a session that served as a live broadcast of the Digiday Podcast.
This year’s expansion of Disney’s automation initiatives was fueled by the company’s progress in making the breadth of its streaming catalog accessible for programmatic buys. This includes, most recently, its interactive ad forms.
“Once we finally were able to enable them, within six weeks the spend was eight times the spend than the year before,” according to Power.
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Here are some of the conversation’s highlights, edited for length and clarity.
The beauty of back-end infrastructure.
One of the benefits of having our own tech stack is that we will be able to take an ad, publish it once, and distribute it to all of our endpoints starting this year.
Audience reach across Disney’s streaming portfolio
If you extended your campaign to Hulu on Disney+, it increased the campaign’s reach by 40%, with a 5% duplication of persons viewing Disney+ content. So it just illustrates that individuals use various applications and places for a variety of reasons.
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Programmatic guaranteed agreements vs. biddable purchases
Last year or the year before that, we were 30% biddable and 70% PG. This year, it flipped. The main takeaway was that [account executives] and the sales team needed to approach it more like a campaign. It is biddable, not’set it and forget it.’ You are not creating a deal ID and then walking away from it. You must still discuss with the customer how much money they want to spend on this, as well as the target demographic, in order to determine how much inventory will be required.
Big money in biddable
We’re seeing some of the world’s largest advertisers activate 100% biddable campaigns with us. Some of them invest almost $100 million each year in biddable ecosystems.
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