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.
]]>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.
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