ESPN is heading to this year\u2019s Cannes Lions as part of Walt Disney Co.\u2019s \u201cone-stop shop\u201d platform, as the sports giant begins to experiment with household-addressable television and retargeting OTT viewers across its digital footprint. \u201cDisney certainly has a lot to say at Cannes this year,\u201d ESPN\u2019s Vikram Somaya, SVP, Global Data Officer & Ad Platforms, says in this interview with Beet.TV.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do believe that the horse has left the stable in terms of us looking at audience buying on linear.\u201d<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s been doing linear optimization for ad targeting, Disney has begun to see \u201cwhat addressable looks and feels like for our audiences,\u201d says Somaya<\/a>. This year and next,\u00a0 the company will work with addressable partners to target ads at the household level.<\/p>\n

ESPN offers a product that \u201cessentially takes what we\u2019re doing on OTT, which is completely measurable from a digital perspective, and then retargets those messages across our digital footprint,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs part of our integration more broadly with the Walt Disney Company we\u2019re now looking to see how we do that broadly across all of the Walt Disney Company properties,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

With the retargeting offering, ESPN can take a 30-second brand spot and \u201cconnect 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on ESPN\u2019s own research and that of partners it\u2019s worked with, the retargeting \u201chas a really positive impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another ESPN offering, called \u201creactive TV,\u201d enables advertisers to build campaigns around major sports milestones that are known in advance\u2014for example, a player\u2019s home run tally.<\/p>\n

Having recently reorganized its sales, technology, direct-to-consumer and international businesses under Kevin Mayer<\/a>, who had been Chief Strategy Officer at Disney, \u201cwe are now open for business as a one-stop shop,\u201d says Somaya in reference to the upcoming Cannes event<\/a>. \u201cA lot of the conversations we will be having in Cannes will be around that notion.<\/p>\n

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented\u00a0by the\u00a0FreeWheel Council for Premium Video<\/a><\/em>. For more videos from the series,\u00a0please visit this page<\/a>.\u00a0 FreeWheel is a Comcast company.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ESPN is heading to this year\u2019s Cannes Lions as part of Walt Disney Co.\u2019s \u201cone-stop shop\u201d platform, as the sports giant begins to experiment with household-addressable television and retargeting OTT viewers across its digital footprint. \u201cDisney certainly has a lot to say at Cannes this year,\u201d ESPN\u2019s Vikram Somaya, SVP, Global Data Officer & Ad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":52505,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[]},"categories":[7262],"tags":[5355,7104,7264,7267,7268],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}