Disney ties mood to messaging with contextual ads amid ad-tech roll-out

• Disney announced a number of recent promoting capabilities at its fourth annual Disney Tech & Data Showcase on Jan. 10, including the flexibility to buy ads across each Hulu and Disney+ in a single campaign. A bundled service, now in beta, will likely be available widely in March 2024.
• The company unveiled its first native, shoppable ad format for streaming, Gateway Shop, that may allow viewers to send on-screen products to their second screen without interrupting their program.
• In addition, Disney announced an expansion of its clean room offering, tapped Innovid and Cint for brand new measurement capabilities and teased Disney’s Magic Words, a first-to-market contextual promoting format that uses advanced data.

Now in its fourth yr, the Disney Tech & Data Showcase helps set the tone for what advertisers can expect from the media giant upfront of its upfront presentation later this yr. This week’s presentation, made on the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, comes as Disney looks to supercharge its promoting offerings and higher monetize its portfolio of live TV, streaming and other properties.

“Disney connects our clients to world-class entertainment, sports and programming with proven engagement that can’t be found anywhere else.” said Rita Ferro, president for global promoting at Disney. “Our industry-leading technology and data capabilities, paired with our global scale and reach, allows us to deliver intentional, and impactful experiences to consumers, while driving performance and effectiveness for brands.”

The latest Gateway Shop offering furthers the corporate’s efforts to connect content with commerce, constructing on GatewayGo, a commerce-enabled ad format it launched in 2020 that relied on email, push notifications and QR codes. The latest format allows viewers to add items they see in TV and movie programming to their second-screen shopping carts on the touch of a button. 

As the push for deeper data reserves continues amid the continued deprecation of the third-party cookie, Disney also expanded its roster of cloud services providers, adding industry leaders Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The company also teamed with Habu to launch the Disney Portal, which allows clients to rise up a clean room on their very own, a process that now takes days and never weeks.

Disney also addressed one other of the yr’s major challenges — the necessity for higher streaming measurement — with latest collaborations with Innovid and Lucid Impact Measurement by Cint. The latter’s always-on dashboard gives advertisers including 2K Games, The Hershey Company and Josh Cellars access to data on ad recall, consideration, purchase intent and brand favorability.

“We mix decisioning, data, engineering, automation, and measurement, delivering an enormous competitive advantage in meeting our promoting partners’ business needs. And having the strongest tech stack within the industry allows us to pave the way in which for even smarter innovation,” said Ajay Arora, senior vice chairman for commerce, growth and identity at Disney.

Disney continues to grow its ad business through self-service and automation features. Disney Campaign Manager has been utilized by greater than 4,200 brands, and will likely be expanded globally in tandem with the expansion of the Disney+ ad tier. Additionally, Disney+ and ESPN+ inventory will likely be available to self-serve domestically this yr.

Lastly, the corporate teased a latest contextual ad product, Disney’s Magic Words, that uses advanced data to analyze scenes and visuals across its library to tie mood and emotion to promoting messages. The offering will likely be available to beta partners at this yr’s upfront and to wider audiences by the top of the yr.