The house of brands is now more unified than ever following the consolidation of sales efforts this fall under Ferro, who is President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships in a unit called Disney Advertising Sales. In this interview with Beet.TV, Ferro recalls taking over the ABC/Disney/Freeform portfolio about 18 months ago and having happy advertisers respond “Where’s ESPN?”

At that point, “we slowly started working toward understand that this was going to come together because the marketplace was asking for it,” she says of the inclusion of ESPN in the unified sales structure.

“It really is about bringing all the best of the brands and storytelling of the Walt Disney Company together so that advertisers can reach audiences across all dayparts, all lifestyles, all genres, in the best way possible.”

Asked about differentiation from other multi-brand publishers, Ferro says it all comes down to one word: Disney.

“I think when you talk about data and technology, everyone has their flavor. I think the difference is Disney. The way we tell stories and connections we have with our fans and our brands, no company has that,” says Ferro. “You name it, we talk to that audience. It’s great storytelling that has really differentiated us and I think bringing it all together only allows us to really accelerate what that’s going to be for partnerships and brands.”

Now that advertising sales, data and technology sit under the purview of Kevin Mayer, who is Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer and International, the company’s products and services are now aligned “under one opportunity to make sure that we can sell you across the portfolio and you have visibility to that. So we’ll have better metrics, better targeting, we’re building out better vendor relationships and better technology partners.”

One recent tech change was Disney ending its involvement with FreeWheel in favor of Google Ad Manager to manage and deliver all online ad campaigns. Disney has worked with both FreeWheel and Google Ad Manager in the past, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

The efforts under Mayer will “allow more visibility, more targeting, better metrics and also allow us to launch new products like programmatic linear television, which we’ll be bringing to market,” Ferro says.

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. 

“We do believe that the horse has left the stable in terms of us looking at audience buying on linear.”

While it’s been doing linear optimization for ad targeting, Disney has begun to see “what addressable looks and feels like for our audiences,” says Somaya. This year and next,  the company will work with addressable partners to target ads at the household level.

ESPN offers a product that “essentially takes what we’re doing on OTT, which is completely measurable from a digital perspective, and then retargets those messages across our digital footprint,” Somaya explains. An ESPN viewer who is known to have seen a 30-second spot on OTT can be sequentially targeted with digital ads across the ESPN digital portfolio.

“As part of our integration more broadly with the Walt Disney Company we’re now looking to see how we do that broadly across all of the Walt Disney Company properties,” he says.

With the retargeting offering, ESPN can take a 30-second brand spot and “connect it to a series of digital notions that can actually do something as complex as sequential advertising to a single viewer. We can take a thirty-second spot and do a series of sixes against that same audience member across our digital networks.”

Based on ESPN’s own research and that of partners it’s worked with, the retargeting “has a really positive impact.”

Another ESPN offering, called “reactive TV,” enables advertisers to build campaigns around major sports milestones that are known in advance—for example, a player’s home run tally.

Having recently reorganized its sales, technology, direct-to-consumer and international businesses under Kevin Mayer, who had been Chief Strategy Officer at Disney, “we are now open for business as a one-stop shop,” says Somaya in reference to the upcoming Cannes event. “A lot of the conversations we will be having in Cannes will be around that notion.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.