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.”
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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