You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
As EVP, Client & Brand Solutions, for Disney Advertising Sales, Valentino is figuring out how best to monetize the ad-supported channels across Disney’s massive portfolio.
In 2021, that means automation, leveraging Disney’s own customer data, widening the client base and improving inclusion.
Disney has spent the last three years building an audience graph, now including Hulu data, with over 1,000 audience identity segments, buyable in an automated fashion.
“We see the results of those outperforming non-targeted work that we’re doing,” says Valentino in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“So we know that Disney first-party data has the opportunity to really drive performance and escalate performance.”
And Valentino has bold bets for how that scale will be achieved.
“Fifty percent of our business will be automated,” she says. “The majority of our (ad) supply will be addressable (and) will be coming through endpoints that are connected.”
With the ongoing limitations imposed on traditional digital audience identifiers, a customer footprint like Disney’s own is going to be useful when it comes to ad targeting.
Rebooting Reach: Disney’s Valentino Combines Scale With Smarts
But Valentino still wants to tap other providers’ audience data, too. So her team is beginning to use “clean room” software, designed as a safe space to match up audience profiles from different providers with privacy in mind, to tackle it.
“We are very much building clean room solutions with the various partners out there, working closely with companies like InfoSum, like Snowflake, et cetera, that really allow clients to plan, to optimise and target using data with the utmost and privacy protections,” she says.
“There’s a lot of development work happening. We will be standing up clean room solutions for several agencies. And my early observations on this is, we’re very early days.
“There’s a ton of educating to be done. There’s a ton of building to be done. And I think everybody is at the crawl phase at the moment, which gives us a real opportunity to build solutions that can scale over at a longterm, which is what our goal is there, ultimately.”
There are ways in which Disney wants to be even broader. For one, it wants to cast a wider advertiser net, having recently launched a self-serve ad platform to open up Disney ad channels to smaller and direct-to-consumer businesses.
Variety Upfronts presented by @Disney will feature an exclusive “Disney and the Future of Inclusive Creativity and Content” panel with top executives from @disneyadsales and @FreeformTV / Onyx Collective on June 15. Register now. https://t.co/BfDOURJGA5 pic.twitter.com/HBzvaaHHVa
— Variety (@Variety) June 8, 2021
But cultural breadth is on the agenda, too.
At its recent upfront sales pitch, Disney’s Hulu launched Onyx Collective, a content brand for people of color; announced an ABC News strand called Voices Of Change and pitched The Undefeated, a news site covering race and sport.
“I’m happy to report that that was very successful,” Valentino says. “All of our agencies are leaning in. They understand the importance of it, their clients understand the importance of it.”
Underpinning it all is a drive to measure exactly how successful the initiatives are.
A system called Disney Culture Index “is going to score ads based on cultural resonance”, Valentino says. “It’s a game-changer for clients because they can now look at, in the mid campaign and post-campaign, ‘How are their investments in content, how is their creativity resonating with consumers and making a difference?’
“So, we’re excited about this first mover opportunity. It’s the right thing to do.”
]]>That’s why Lisa Valentino is offering technology to support refined audience targeting capability.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Valentino, executive Vice President, Client Solutions & Addressable Enablement, Disney Advertising Sales, explains how how developments announced at last week’s first-ever Disney Platform Tech Showcase, as well as others, can help achieve that aim.
The corporation is wrapping together all its first-party audience targeting capabilities from the Disney Audience Graph in something called Disney Select, the mechanism to make those criteria buyable.
According to the announcement: “With Disney Select, marketers can select desired audiences from Disney’s extensive library of first-party segments that are designed to meet client needs like buyer behavior, household characteristics and psychographics.”
Disney has spent the last three years building an audience graph, now including Hulu data, with over 1,000 audience identity segments, buyable in an automated fashion.
Lisa Valentino, EVP of client and brand solutions and addressable enablement at @Disney, will chair the inaugural Campaign US Media Awards. #CampaignMediaAwardshttps://t.co/OHoELiPXy4
— Campaign US (@CampaignLiveUS) January 28, 2021
As the Disney empire expands, Valentino acknowledges that advertisers don’t necessarily want to reach all parts of the map.
“Reach is important in selling products and services, which is what our clients want to do every day,” she says. “But reach is different today.
“At Hulu, we see 92 million connected viewers every month on the ad-supported side.
It’s less about ‘How do I engage the 92 million?’ It’s ‘How do I understand those audience sets? What types of segmentation can I take advantage of on a platform like Hulu?'”
Over the last couple of years, Hulu has innovated with ad formats that deliver whilst shows are paused, whilst viewers are binge-watching, interactive ads, choice-based ads and more.
One of the latest formats is GatewayGo, allowing viewers to take direct action with a brand service on a second screen.
Hulu announces a new offer-focused ad format called GatewayGo https://t.co/ZRscTrlhvw #tech #marketing #technews pic.twitter.com/8DkTnBzkIL
— IceBoxDesigns (@iceboxdesigns) June 23, 2020
Valentino says: “We think about Hulu almost as an incubator for new ad products.”
Hulu leadership is increasingly being folded into that of Disney+ in an effort to address international markets, where Hulu has mostly struggled to gain traction.
But it is as “Star” that Disney is bringing a Hulu-like show bundle to international audiences.
As viewing grows and targeting gets more capable, Valentino wants to be able to show ad buyers proof of effectiveness.
She is delivering planning and measurement through partnerships like with Samba TV partnership, making data available in Nielsen Media Impact and Innovid, plus a Hulu attribution tool that D2C clients use to connect their own CRM to Hulu.
You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>While she “didn’t look like a person of color” or sound like someone from outside the U.S., she felt like an “imposter,” she says in this Beet.TV video.
She decided that being her “authentic” self was essential in her life, and a key part of a successful career in brand marketing.
The veteran marketer, who has worked for PepsiCo, Toys“R”Us and Kellogg, was named CMO of Citi last September.
Hosting this session is Rita Ferro, President of Disney Advertising Sales and Brand Partnerships for The Walt Disney Company.
Hassan talks about building a diverse work force at Citi and in the wider marketing ecosystem. She talks about making marketing more relevant in a diverse society.
She talks of concrete steps Citi is taking to help close the racial wealth gap.
This 5-part series abut diversity and inclusion is made possible by a generous contribution to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico from Disney Advertising Sales.
Since 2017, I have been been an advocate for this group. Please find the latest video report from San Juan with the Clubs’ president Olga Ramos. You can make a tax deductible contribution right here.
Thank you Rita and Carla for this very special segment. Gracias!
]]>A content powerhouse, according to the man bringing them together.
From October 1, the video ad management platforms at Disney and Hulu combine as a single one called Disney Hulu XP, helping ad buyers make one buy across the combined footprint and reduce repeat ad exposure on either platform.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matthew Barnes, Sr. Director, Programmatic Sales & Strategy at The Walt Disney Company, discusses the launch.
. @Hulu will launch a new feature called: Disney Hulu XP
The feature allows advertisers a chance to place their commercials across both Hulu and Disney’s TV networks.https://t.co/GCB85lYPoM#DisneyUpfront pic.twitter.com/Gs7CrZUElo
— Disney TV Animation News (@DisneyTVANews) June 5, 2020
“From a programmatic standpoint, the thing that is biggest coming to market is the ability to put Disney and Hulu in a single storefront,” he says.
“Historically, buyers have had to come to Disney and to Hulu separately to access that premium inventory. And for the first time ever, we’re going to allow it in a single seat for buyers to activate against all of that content.
“Any of the inventory that’s available direct on the Hulu side is available programmatically. And, on the Disney side, all of our content that we have enabled to execute programmatically will be available in this offering, which is going to provide the marketplace with scale that they haven’t seen before from a premium publisher of our size.”
Barnes says the path to purchase will be further smoothed by the system being a single supply source, boosting transparency. It is powered by Magnite.
That singularity is important to Barnes, because he thinks publishers’ connections to demand-side ad platforms (DSPs) is becoming critical.
“The DSPs are a huge component of the ecosystem and something that, frankly, we’re spending a lot more time talking with the DSPs about how we can create a better working relationship, a better connection between publishers and the buy-side,” he adds.
“In the world of connected TV in the future, it really comes down to, ‘How we can create the right connection to allow our customers, advertisers, to scale in a safe way across our whole portfolio to find their actual users?’
“And that’s where that data really comes into play, and making sure that we have that safe in a privacy-enabled way.
“Disney, fortunately, has the ability to have a rich archive of first-party data that we can tap into.”
You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
But, while SVoD grows, other parts of the Mouse’s empire are busy revolutionizing how they sell ads and deliver them to relevant audiences.
The Disney Advertising Sales footprint, of course, includes ABC, ESPN, NatGeo, FX Networks and Freeform. All of them are working to embrace connected TV opportunities to more precisely show ads to the right viewers.
Whilst that is considerable scale, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Laura Nelson, SVP, Advertising Solutions & Performance Advertising at Disney Advertising Sales, says she can’t do it without striking a series of partnerships.
Chief amongst them, Disney’s Luminate ad-tech suite is enlisting Samba TV to enable real-world ad outcome attribution and is joining Nielsen’s addressable TV tests.
“The next 12 months across the industry is really scaling different solutions in linear addressable on a national basis in a way we haven’t been able to do before,” she says.
“If we don’t have consensus across the industry and we don’t try out different methodologies, I don’t think we can solve it.
“We definitely can’t solve it in a vacuum we’re alone. If we need to be participating across the industry.”
At Disney’s virtual upfront event, it shared its new ad formats, it offered brands a way to help rejuvenate their businesses following the pandemic, featured some surprise cameos that included Tom Brady and featured Jimmy Kimmel’s annual upfront roast.
— Adweek (@Adweek) June 5, 2020
To that end, Nelson and Disney recently struck a number of partnerships.
Disney is now working with Samba TV, a content recommendation and viewer tracking vendor in which it previously also invested, to gather outcome-based metrics like foot traffic driven, geolocation and purchase behaviour – not just from IP-enabled TV but also linear.
“The ability to take that data and tie it to cross-platform linear and digital and tie it to sales outcomes was hugely important to us coming into this upfront season,” Nelson says.
“We’ve been looking at a lot of different partners and feel that this partnership is getting us into the market with a really unique offering.”
What’s particularly new is that Disney is extending that capability to Hulu.
“Given the speed of our integration, it was really important for us to make sure that we had an offering that really covered the full portfolio,” Nelson adds.
Here’s how Disney will incorporate Hulu into its ad deals https://t.co/AoAXrfrPBK pic.twitter.com/A0uk3TrwD9
— Ad Age (@adage) June 5, 2020
Disney is a member of Project OAR, the consortium formed last year by Vizio to drive connected TV ad standards.
Now Disney is also joining in the test by Nielsen of its addressable TV advertising measurement capabilities.
Disney says it will evaluate how the solution works by testing addressable ad campaigns in conjunction with existing workflows and systems.
“In addressable TV, scale is most important,” Nelson says. “The Nielsen addressable test will really allow us to determine if the methodology in which they’re using and the technology that they’ve inherited with some of their purchases is going to allow us to scale fastest.
“We need Nielsen to be part of the solution in order to determine how the measurement’s going to work.”
The two new partnerships come after Disney Advertising Sales in March began working with AT&T’s Xandr, using its Invest TV self-service software to help advertisers buy linear TV ads in a more straightforward way.
“We think this is going to provide automation and an ease of data-driven linear, as well as aggregated reporting across multiple publishers in a way the industry hasn’t seen yet,” Nelson says.
“We are up to 900 segments that are available for purchase in a turnkey fashion, but also are working really closely with partners to provide custom solutions where needed.”
]]>After several acquisitions like Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 21st Century Fox in recent years, that scale has growth even further, as the company also looks to develop a stronger relationship of its own with paying customers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dana McGraw – Vice President, Audience Modeling & Data Science, Disney & ESPN Advertising Sales and Distribution – lifts the lid on how Disney is leveraging consumer data across its range of services, and how it will do so in the future.
“As the Walt Disney company we have a wealth of first party data so it puts us in a really good position to be able to kind of understand our consumers and our guests,” McGraw says.
“We have a kind of corporate-level data management platform that houses data, that helps us have clean data that’s easily managed across. And then from an ad sales perspective, we really operate a bit separately from that so that we make sure that we’re respecting, permissioning and consent in the utmost form.
“We have many, many touch points. We have theme parks, we have our movie studio, we have consumer products business, retail store business as well … ESPN, ABC, Freeform now with Nat Geo and FX on board. So there’s all of these touch points including all of our owned and operated apps, businesses and all the different ways you can interact with us.”
McGraw explains that Disney is working on using that data to deeply understand different types of customers.
Then it is feeding those understandings back in to making different ad spaces available to the right ad buyer.
“We’ve built models on all different kinds of behavioural aspects – gamers versus non gamers, movie theatre goers, all different sort of audience segments that people can buy and we can then target against,” she says.
“Now we’ve extended into offering that same inventory on connected TV. And of course the longterm vision is to think about how do you advertise sequentially, whether it be linear to digital? So you are exposed on linear, what’s the next in the sequence? So it’s not just the incrementality of connected TV which is certainly of significant importance to most advertisers, but it’s also the supplementality.”
Following the acquisitions which have significantly grown the scale, reach and influence of Disney, the company is busy tweaking its new portfolio assets to sing from the same data hymnsheet.
McGraw says she is “extending our models to all of the Fox assets that we inherited”.
Across the piece, the idea is to knit together a consumer’s life across all of the Disney footprint, from screen to theme park, in a bid to understand their next actions.
“That’s been a work to sort of ingest that data, understand the data and extend any models so that you can truly buy across our portfolio on an audience segment behaviorally targeted basis,” she adds.
“Offering that at scale on connected TV over time is really exciting to us. You start thinking about the sequence of messaging and not just the reach or incremental reach and reach of frequency.
“You’re thinking about sequencing (ads) more holistically. So those things are really exciting. It’s exciting to us. If you look at our footprint and we sort of have this really broad reach, so now how do we make that even more meaningful for an advertiser?”
McGraw was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>According to Disney Advertising Sales svp of cross portfolio solutions Laura Nelson, in conversation with Beet.TV at the annual ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, Disney caught on to just how powerful Target’s in-store and online data was. The plan with the partnership, she says, is to work with both Target and their brand clients that have big presences in Target stores, to show the effectiveness of the media they’re buying, both on linear platforms and, down the line, on OTT platforms.
“At the most basic level, we’re trying to show that there’s a sales lift tied to the ad exposure for the networks across Disney’s advertising sales portfolio,” says Nelson. More holistically, Disney plans to be able to use Roundel data to work with brands to better time their campaigns around a media schedule that will get them the best results, “tied to whatever creative they’re running at any given time,” she adds.
Retailers like Target as well as Kroger and Walmart are putting the vast amounts of shopper marketing data that they’re sitting on to work, as advertising revenue becomes a clear and valuable supplementary business to core retail. In addition to Disney, Roundel is partnering with Index Exchange to segment publisher audiences based on customers’ purchasing behavior.
For now, Nelson sees Disney’s partnership with Roundel an initial match to brands in the CPG, electronics and toys categories, and the company has plans to test strategies with over-the-counter pharma brands as well. The plan is to start with categories that have the most products in Target stores and online, whose sales would see the most considerable lift using a smarter media schedule strategy with Disney and Roundel. But while Nelson is currently seeking proof of concept, eventually, she’s seeking scale. Importantly, Roundel’s data covers a wide variety of categories, as Nelson points out that one strategy doesn’t fit all pockets of retail.
“This partnership helps us test and understand how a business outcomes deal could work. We could do one or two of these, but we have to figure out how to do these at scale. That’s why we think the Roundel partnership is so unique,” says Nelson.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At the NewFronts, strategic advisory firm MediaLink teamed with YouTube for a kickoff breakfast and discussion that included Tara Walpert Levy, VP of agency and brand solutions at Google and YouTube.
Referring to the ever-rising competition among streaming TV providers, Kassan observes, “there are peoples’ careers who depend on it and there are companies that are looking at it as their future, and there’s a lot of barbarians at the gates right now.”
He notes that after Disney announced Disney+, Wall Street’s reaction was to push the stock of the Walt Disney Co. “to an all-time high.” Similarly, WarnerMedia has “an amazing existing franchise with HBO and extending that and bringing Bob Greenblatt to the party I think is going to make a big statement,” Kassan adds in a reference to the recently appointed Chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment.
He says Comcast and its NBCUniversal juggernaut “are certainly not to be counted out but very much in the middle of it. Not to underestimate YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix “and you just go on and on. You’ve got billions and billions of dollars being spent against the backdrop of creating content, and the consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for that content.”
As for the prospects for advertising spending on television amid all the groundbreaking change, some question whether marketers that can’t spend money the way they traditionally have done “are just going to put that to their bottom line. We know that’s not the case because you still need to market your goods and services. I think it has to be reimagined. It’s not going to be the way it was, that’s for sure, but it will still exist and it will still thrive.”
]]>“You’ve got a lot going on, but ultimately each of these companies needs to figure out a strategy that ensures that the video that they’re producing and that they’re delivering is getting watched and that it’s being monetized to build a business,” the company’s CRO says.
On the publisher side, IRIS.TV has a video personalization and programming platform that drives more views and guides content strategy and makes your site. For marketers it’s a marketplace for distributing branded video and sponsored content in-stream alongside editorial video across the company’s publisher clients.
Through integrations across the ecosystem of video players and content management systems, IRIS.TV acts as “a brain in terms of helping to decide what is the best most relevant video that any individual should be seeing at any given period of time,” Harrison says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event.
The company’s focus is on the “core video environment” of major news, sports, lifestyle, entertainment media companies. More people watching more video ultimately results in more ad inventory being created.
“And if there’s more ad inventory, then it’s also about ensuring that you are highly relevant in terms of the advertising that you show,” says Harrison, who joined IRIS.TV a year ago from Oracle Data Cloud. “So we start to match up the context of the video to the actual context of the ads which solves for both sides of the equation.”
The key has always been about finding “the right mix of advertising or subscriber based-models” against content, something for which companies like AT&T Disney, Fox and others are spending considerable resources. The end goal for all, according to Harrison, is “to be viable.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>“I was fascinated by MoviePass,” says Jeff Cole in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “Even though MoviePass isn’t going to be around to celebrate at the big party, they showed that there was a real love of film in the theatres.”
He credits MoviePass, which faces steep financial challenges as The New York Times and others have reported, with helping to drive the 7% unit increase in box office ticket sales in 2018.
“I think MoviePass was why box office was actually up this year,” says Cole, citing in particular the popularity of documentaries like RBG, Welcome to My Neighborhood and Three Identical Strangers. “I think you’re going to see the whole movie business slowly move to a subscription model the same way the music business has moved to a subscription model.”
He is also enthralled by the rise of direct-to-consumer streaming services from the likes of Disney while foreseeing distinct restrictions on that growth.
“This is the most important year for direct to consumer video. All the rules and all the players are going to change. I suspect there’s not room for more than two or three of these services as pay services, so it remains to be seen if they can exist independently or they will re-consolidate,” Cole says.
Nonetheless, he sees Disney as the dominant studio in a field of eight that over time has shrunk to six. “We’ve never seen one studio dominate the way Disney is now,” leaving studios like Paramount and Sony “almost in the dust.” Considering some of Disney’s slate of offerings this year, including Dumbo, a live version of The Lion King and Avengers, he adds, “They’re unstoppable at the moment.”
Consumers have clearly won—at least until now, according to Cole, whose research shows that for people under the age of 30, only 20% of their television is live (mostly sports). The rest is recorded or streamed.
“All of a sudden, the consumer for ten dollars a month was getting all this content from all the studios, a fantastic bargain, in three years may be paying forty dollars for the same thing.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>That means spending on addressable TV – with which buyers can use advanced data and return path to more precisely target viewers and households – would represent only around 1.1% of total US TV ad spend.
What could draw more spending? For one, we know that US OTT device penetration is high – but also that much consumption through those is devices is of ad-free, subscription VOD.
Furthermore, the Beet Retreat heard many views about the importance of scale, with claims that ” about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines“, worries that many advertisers are still just experimenting and a call for more inventory to be given to addressable TV.
In this panel, several executives further debated how addressable can hit scale.
Even the largest of media companies is grappling with how to transform their ad sales initiatives…
Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:
“The whole reason that you’re seeing all this consolidation in the media industry is to get scale, and to get reach. Other companies have already done it. We’re doing it at our point.
“We had all these individual businesses that had different types of scale. In the linear side, it worked – but now we have to spend millions of dollars … to find the right partners to be able to activate the inventory and look at it holistically.
Years ago, few may have predicted that paid video over the internet would be as big as it has become. But the rise of Netflix and Amazon now presents a challenge to media companies. Panelists discussed whether those players would emerge in to TV ad sales, and how TV companies must team to compete…
Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:
“If you think of our competitors particularly in the space like Netflix and Amazon. Netflix has scale, but are they going to be able to sustain what they’re doing with one revenue stream (subscription)?
“Amazon, on the other hand, is a whole other thing. Right? They have this whole base. They have multiple revenue streams coming in, and then they’re going to invest in content. To me, they feel like our biggest competitor from a scale and a reach perspective.”
Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:
“They’re going to invest, between Netflix and Amazon, over $20 billion next year, which is larger than most of the TV ad revenues of any single companies in this room. They own the entire consumer funnel.
“We in the TV industry … need better consortiums, better marketplaces, better easier ways for the buy side to buy in a more frictionless manner. I think we’re seeing that right now with EGTA, with EVX, with RTLs, TV Marketplace, with OpenAP. We see a lot of starts to that solution.”
The internal structure of the relationship between advertiser brands and their buying agencies influences the kind of ad inventory being chased, which may ultimately impact outcomes…
David Hohman, EVP & Managing Director, Nielsen:
“Right now, most of the media agencies are winning business on a savings guarantee, which means that they have to show the advertiser that they’re spending less money. They want reductions every single year.
“So, there’s this pressure on agencies who are trying to innovate, who are trying to do the right things for their clients, and in the end of the day, they’re chasing low CPMs.”
The entire media universe is growing – but consumers still only have 24 hours in a given day. Panel host Ashley J. Swartz of Furious Corp cited eMarketer research showing 2018 consumer media time went from 12 hours and 7 minutes to 12 hours and 8 minutes a day. She asked if consumers’ capacity to consume content naturally limits scale…
Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:
“The latest stats on Facebook are that less than 20% of their audience will view a video ad for more than three seconds. That’s not going to move the needle.
“I definitely think there’s a capacity issue – the human conscience capacity issue.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>For Disney, the acquisition a year ago added to an already-broad portfolio of assets, and came right as the company was figuring out a direct-to-consumer SVOD strategy and learning to get to grips with a whole new world of advertising capabilities.
In this Beet Retreat interview with Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV, Disney’s SVP, Audience Solutions at Disney Advertising Sales, Laura Nelson, opens up on a big year for the Mouse.
“Disney, as a whole, is going through a huge transformation right now,” she said. “We have a ton of operational challenges because we are effectively still in the middle of reorganizing our whole company.
“We have multiple systems and multiple process, and we potentially may be inheriting new ones. So just trying to streamline and create a technology stack and a data stack that is unified across our company is going to take us some time. We’re behind some of the other larger publishers … who have already gone through that.”
Those changes are coming about including through combining ESPN and ABC ad sales efforts in a single division, led by Disney’s chairman of direct-to-consumer and international efforts Kevin Mayer. Nelson said: “We’ve actually changed the way the whole company is set up now so that there will be one group and on infrastructure that’s going to do that across sales and marketing.”
Nelson said a big part of the transformation involves growing a desire to be more transactional and automated in a data-driven way. She wants to eliminate friction in the ad sales process and believes automation can bring benefits for both buyer and seller.
But, despite fragmentation in how the industry is approaching that opportunity, Nelson is sceptical that a single industry platform can be achievable.
Nelson concedes Disney is arriving late to the idea of selling ads based on advanced audience data segments across different TV networks, in a way that makes it seamless for buyers.
For instance, Disney’s ABC is not a member of OpenAP, the joint Turner/Fox/ Viacom initiative to normalize consumer identity attribute descriptions, which was also joined by NBCU, though of course 21st Century Fox’s Fox Networks Group is plugged in.
But she also questioned whether such an opportunity can work when who is paying for it isn’t necessarily clear.
Nelson says she aims to unify consumer data sets including ESPN sports affinities, Disney lookalike models, theme parks, Disney gamers and, later, digital viewing.
“A lot of different divisions – from the film studio to ABC Television – have been doing it their own way,” she says.
“I think really bringing all the processes together, being uniform, and not having people create their own ideas is going to be more beneficial.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Disney+ will be the third piece of a direct-to-consumer triad when combined with ESPN+, which launched last April, and Disney’s stake in Hulu, the President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company,” Ferro says.
Disney believes that direct-to-consumer, which requires a new approach to content allocation, which in Disney’s case includes pulling its movies and shows from Netflix next year, gives both consumers and advertisers the best opportunities.
“What you saw in the launch of that product was the quickness of adoption,” Ferro says of ESPN+, which provided access to more mainstream and “unique” sports like boxing. “Five months in we announced we were at a million subscribers and we’ve only grown from there.”
She describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.
The third leg of the direct-to-consumer stool is Hulu, the unprofitable streaming pioneer that will be 60% owned by Disney at the beginning of 2019 by virtue of its acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox. Hulu is where ABC and Freeform programming resides, with ad-supported “live and on-demand content in season,” says Ferro.
“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,” she says of the company’s direct-to-consumer initiatives.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>To make audience targeting more mainstream and move away from age and gender demographics requires a combination of technology and education, says Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales. It’s a question of “how do we transform this industry into transacting in new ways,” Nelson says in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.
“The ability to go and negotiate a deal and have the right conversations with the right people, both on the publisher side and on the buying side, is a challenge.”
Things like framing and negotiating deals during the annual Upfront selling ritual are among the obstacles. “When a large amount of money is transacted in a quick period of time, how do you get into the nitty gritty of an advanced deal makes it more challenging and can sometimes slow down a process that people don’t necessarily want to be very slow,” Nelson says.
In the quest for more advanced targeting, advertisers are a big part of the push. Meanwhile, agencies that are under more competitive pressure than ever before try to navigate the maze of publishers they need to deal with to transact business. “But I also think they’re incredibly busy,” she says of the buy-side crowd.
Asked how comScore and Nielsen could swiftly conjure up a solution to ease cross-platform complications, Nelson points to “great disparities between the measurement, particularly on the digital side. So how you’re actually transacting with the client and the value of a buy varies depending on the source. And that creates a lot of issues on our side from an inventory management perspective and a forecasting perspective.”
With new mediums like OTT “exploding,” she says “measurement needs to catch up with transactions.”
From a privacy standpoint, Disney’s approach to harnessing user data for targeting purposes is “careful and cautious” as it creates unique audience segments from fans and guests. That spectrum includes users of mobile gaming and websites, people with a known affinity for Disney products and content and, ultimately, information about fans of ESPN “so that we can create audience segments that represent the totality of our audience and make partnerships with our clients to match that information to then target against.
“The goal is to pre-target who they’re looking for ahead of time so that at the back end when you’re closing the loop you know you’ve reached that person versus trying to guess.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, A+E’s EVP of Ad Sales discusses why advertisers haven’t taken the full plunge into advanced targeting and the likelihood that the ad-supported model is in the future for companies like Amazon, Netflix and the planned Disney service.
He says advertisers are “getting so pressured to prove the effectiveness of every nickel they spend. Everyone’s known for a long time TV works, especially on the upper-funnel metrics of awareness and all that. But there’s been like a vagueness to that. It doesn’t really tie back to ROI as cleanly as some other things.”
Being able to more closely tie TV ad exposure to tangible business results “gives the ammunition that the marketers need to keep recommending premium video as that centerpiece and not be shifting money somewhere else,” Olsen says.
Advertisers are looking to strike a balance “between what digital is claiming it can do and what we’ve always known TV could do, and then just really getting to kind of the right balance to answer on the effectiveness of both,” he adds.
It’s worth noting that while age and gender has been the transactional TV demographic for years, secondary targets have been available for more than three decades, Olsen observes. TV networks have the tools to go beyond, say, trying to reach everyone ages 18-49 to more strategic targets.
“Clients I think are interested but they’re not jumping in with both feet yet” given questions about data quality and scalability. “So I think it’s finding the right balance between what is still mass, what is targeted and then you take it a step further, what should go to addressable, et cetera.”
Then there’s the viewer balancing act. While many are seeking to avoid ads, that comes with a higher cost.
But Olsen points to signs of hope. “Some of the stuff we’ve seen, though, isn’t as daunting as it may look right now,” he says. “Some of the S-VOD penetration is kind of hitting a ceiling here in the U.S. and I think those companies are actually looking at ad models themselves.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix has an ad model, Amazon, the new Disney service. All those things eventually have ad models as part of that product. I think they will be more tailored ads and more personalized will be kind of the magic to it.
This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.
]]>Whether it’s Twitter and ESPN or Disney and Tastemade, “To me, that was very encouraging seeing all these partnerships form and bringing premium video into a more expanded space,” Francois Lee says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Among the deluge of announcements at the NewFronts, Disney revealed that the launch of the Disney Eats brand, partnering with online foodie network Tastemade to develop original content, as Deadline reports.
As someone who works primarily in the television space, the EVP of Video Investment at media agency Assembly is always on the lookout for “places where we can find premium TV-like video in a brand-safe environment with scale.”
Besides acknowledging the nexus of digital and traditional TV, Lee comes away from the NewFronts presentations impressed by the increasing number of publishers launching their own over-the-top channels. “It’s definitely table stakes now,” he says.
While content was front and center at the NewFronts, performance metrics or guarantees were less so. “I think there’s an expectation that if you’re in digital video you’ll be able to provide digital video like metrics, which is not always the case of course.”
Lee is encouraged by better TV-targeting options from the likes of OpenAP, calling it a “healthy trend.” While measurement still needs to advance, “from an attribution model standpoint there’s a lot more we know about what networks what dayparts what programs are driving ROI.”
The missing piece is incremental improvement on ROI on the back end of campaigns.
“We need the networks to say, ‘if you’re going to create this data-led approach then you need to guarantee me ROI on the back end,’” for example guaranteeing performance on age/sex demos plus one of an advertiser’s own targets. “We want an actual ROI on the back end, which I think would really put skin in the game for the networks,” Lee adds.
“We’re definitely seeing improvements from last year to this year. We’re not quite there yet, but I think we’ve made quite a lot of progress in a year.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Jenckes, who is President, Advertising, Comcast Cable believes now is the time to be very optimistic about what premium video can be.
“It is the best way for marketers to reach their audiences. We’re coming off of the greatest Upfront in history. There’s a lot of successes that we can look at,” Jenckes says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Comcast/FreeWheel Client Summit.
Add to those factors “this incredibly, from my perspective, optimistic collaboration between all the players in the ecosystem.” Whether it’s networks or distributors, “We know the power of what we have and if we work together we can create value for everybody,” Jenckes says.
Now for the challenges. Alongside audience and data fragmentation, they include new digital competition and the need to rationalize different sources of demand.
While the golden age of TV is upon us, more platforms and viewing choices are making it difficult to pull together audiences for advertising purposes. And fragmentation isn’t a problem solely limited to audiences.
“Everybody has their own different data pools. People are struggling for how do you create joint identity across platform, or how do you find that segments you’re looking for across multiple pools of data.”
Among the many tools that Comcast’s Advanced Advertising Group has developed is its new Blockchain Insights Program, which combines the capabilities of FreeWheel, Strata and Visible World. The initiative expands upon the advertising relationship between Comcast and NBCUniversal as well as new collaborations with Disney, Altice USA, Channel 4 (UK), Cox Communications, Mediaset Italia and TF1 Group (France).
The companies will work together on a new and improved advertising approach to facilitate the secure exchange of non-personal, audience insights for addressable advertising.
“For us, making sure that the tools exist for that to happen as efficiently and effectively as possible is critical.”
This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying The New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.
]]>Like other media executives whose content is distributed on an ever-increasing number of platforms, Debra O’Connell “would like to see it move faster. We continue to help drive that discussion” about cross-platform measurement.
In the meantime, Disney has made it easier for advertisers to avail themselves of opportunities across a content portfolio that offers “something for all life stages,” the EVP of Sales & Marketing for ABC Television Group says in this interview with Beet.TV.
While ESPN maintains a separate sales organization, as Variety reports, “When clients want us to work together or we have a great opportunity to align both groups we will continue to work together,” says O’Connell. “Actually, having Disney ABC sales as one portfolio makes that streamlining even easier.”
Disney was an early proponent of enabling brands to target desired audiences beyond traditional Nielsen age/sex demographics. “There’s absolutely an appetite for it,” she says. The company’s recommendation for many advertisers is a balance of branding at scale and targeting a particular audience segment “for a particular solution that they’re looking for or key performance indicator that they’d like to see as a return on investment for that campaign.”
She believes the industry is “not quite half way there” on uniform cross-platform measurement but that in the next five years there will be more than one option.
Having a few measurement solutions “as opposed to just one individual monopoly” would provide variety while maintaining “some kind of standardization of what that measurement needs to look like” to provide a true picture of audience and viewership.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“You think about even the best and brightest minds in Hollywood and how many times do you have hits versus misses?” says Harvin Furman, Starcom’s SVP COE Digital Acceleration, in an interview with Beet.TV.
Furman also observes that the two competing business models around video — the one optimized for TV, where substantial resources are invested in developing a limited slate of programming, and the other for digital, where a greater volume of content is produced cheaply to see what bubbles up to the top — are actually starting to merge. By way of example, he points to Disney, which last year acquired Maker Studios. Their programming often covers similar Disney themes, like fairy tales and superheroes, but Maker’s content is shorter-form with a sensibility that’s been honed for a millennial audience.
Another interesting trend that Furman saw play out at this year’s upfronts was that networks were talking up their blockbuster hit strategies and weren’t touting their digital assets, which were a major theme two years ago.
“They’re still trying to remind advertisers of the power of sight and sound and motion in television,” he says.
“We have a strong philosophy of how we do deals outside of the MVPD ecosystem. We do them short-term, in a non-exclusive fashion and we want to be paid for our product. We are eager to experiment in new forms of distribution,” he explains, adding that now Disney content can be found on iTunes, Netflix and other outlets.
Beyond TV, Disney’s corporate priorities this year are on opening Shanghai Disneyland and the release of Star Wars in December, he says. For more insight into Disney’s focus this year, check out this video interview.
We spoke with him at CES after his session moderated by Wenda Harris Mallard, COO of MediaLink.
Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all our coverage here.
]]>The talent that Maker Studios works with is closely involved in programming, production and branded content, Krebs says. “Brands needs to understand that creators have an audience for a reason and speak in their voice and if they don’t speak in their voice the creators won’t do it,” he says. Specifically, if a creator produces a video that feels inauthentic, chances are they’ll lose audience and therefore money. That sort of “self-preservation” helps ensure the branded content process is collaborative and worthwhile to both parties, he says.
Maker Studios is owned by Disney, which acquired the digital content network for up to $950 million this past spring. “There is a natural alignment. We are in a huge movie production company now so there are dozens of other stories we can attach to online video,” he explains, pointing to a video for the Maleficent film in which a Maker Studios makeup artist showed her audience how to become Maleficent. “Disney didn’t have that before joining Maker. We have folks who bring those things to life,” he says.
We interviewed Krebs at the Beet.TV leadership summit on branded video. You can find additional videos from the event here.
]]>“We’ve already seen some of the stickiness increase,” the group’s video products and technology VP JR Grant tells Beet.TV.
“(They place) an emphasis on getting more content types and activities for kids to interact with to improve engagement in the app.”
The Watch services for Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior were updated with new designs and new features, notably games. “What was primarily a video experience is now a more immersive experience,” Grant added.
We spoke with him at the TV of Tomorrow conference. He was interviewed for Beet.TV by Furious Minds CEO and founder Ashley J. Swartz. You can find more videos of our coverage here.
]]>The co-founders recounted the early days of the company when it began in a back yard. “The idea was if we could come together and share audiences and build an infrastructure, we could all scale and build to where we are today. That was a proof of concept that if we leveraged everyone’s channels we could all grow,” Ben Donovan, co-founder, tells us. That notion of cross-pollination and sharing audiences played a large role in expanding the business that began with a comedy channel that quickly became one of the fastest growing YouTube channels.
Ultimately, the programmer was successful because it tapped into an underserved niche by delivering content online that viewers couldn’t find elsewhere, the founders say.
Earlier this week, Disney shared with investors its plans for Maker Studios as a distribution platform.
]]>“Overnight, we updated 1.7 billion games back in March. We’re doing over 100 million views a month,” Rovio chief marketing officer Peter Vesterbacka told Beet.TV in this video interview during the Cannes Lions advertiser conflab. “It’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest, video distribution networks on the planet now.”
Initially, the video addition was to carry Rovio’s own weekly Angry Birds animated series. But the Finnish firm added a promo channel for Disney’s ‘Monsters University’ movie, and now Vesterbacka is promising this digital audience scale to advertisers in Cannes.
“Brands want to be on the first screen,” he said. “The first screen is mobile and tablet, it’s not TV anymore.”
]]>“The premise is that marketers that want to reach their audience can focus on finding the right audience and delivering the commercial without thinking in silos – without thinking, ‘this is a online video, this is a mobile video or this is a connected TV video or gaming console.'”
Disney is the first advertiser to use this new technology. For Disney’s recent movie Oz the Great and Powerful, Disney earned 300 percent more time spent and 6.7 percent of viewers engaged with the interactive ad, Chalozin says.
A recent study by Innovid involving 50 interactive ad campaigns for theatrical releases found that 15 out of 20 opening weekend top-grossing films were using the technology and over 4.5 percent of viewers engaged with the interactive ad, compared to the industry average reported by Google of 0.67 percent.
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