Disney's New Ad Sales Tech Pathways

For two Disney Ad Sales executives overseeing implementation of these tools, unveiled at the first of Disney's three 2021 virtual Upfront presentations, early reaction suggests that this enrollment mission will be accomplished in successful fashion. "There's been a lot of excitement around this work, and we're excited to offer this at broad scale," says Dana McGraw, the unit's vice president of audience modeling and data science. "We've seen a lot of excitement among both brands and agencies over what we've announced."

"Programmatic buying and selling is all about getting smarter and more efficient with the audiences we're trying to reach," adds Matt Barnes, senior director of programmatic sales at Disney Advertising Sales. "The advantage we bring is marrying programmatic to our content and giving advertisers the best of both worlds. That's the offering people have been asking [about] for years, with the goal of how we do that at scale."

DRAX, short for Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange, is the company's new tech tool to tap into a more efficient programmatic sales cycle. Under this automated process, clients can both choose and control what ad campaigns are implemented and where they run, be it Freeform, ESPN, ABC, Hulu or another Disney-owned programming service with a commercial load. Along with this ability, users can make inventory commitments anytime in programmatic fashion.

What DRAX makes possible for Barnes and his colleagues is that it "allows us to bring bid-able deals to an equal priority in ad servers, so that brands are better able to activate at scale and be successful in a bid-able environment, versus a traditional programmatic guarantee environment," he explains. "What DRAX is doing is grounding out our offering to allow clients to transact against the whole portfolio of programmatic (inventory) at scale, in whichever way is best for them."

McGraw's staff will be dealing with Disney Select, another of the company's new tech pathways to generate 2021 Upfront commitments. Select is a databank housing information on 1,000 audience segments, arranged by demographic or psychographic. Sales personnel can retrieve data from Select to pinpoint, then examine, behavior or purchasing trends that can impact specific campaigns.

"We've also built it around machine-learning expertise that allows us to build custom models," McGraw says. "It's built toward meeting category needs. We have robust first-party data and we've built out a data science team, allowing marketers to leverage the audience segments that we serve."

Hotel/motel chain Marriott International is among the advertisers excited by Disney's latest sales tech efforts. "Companies like Disney have a wealth of insights that can enrich our IP data in a brand and privacy-safe environment, with the means to engage people across devices and media," Marriott senior vice president of marketing channels and optimization Andy Kauffman elaborates in a statement provided to MediaVillage.

For Rebecca Traverso, marketing vice president at bra maker ThirdLove, advancements like Select showcase how Disney's services "have proven [Disney] to be strong, strategic partners that understand our business, our consumers, and how to engage them with compelling content that our brand continues to leverage for growth."

Both Select and DRAX are formatted to work in agnostic fashion with any company coming from any product category. "We're building such a robust set of segmentation that we can address each category uniquely," McGraw says.

As Disney moves toward implementation of an end-to-end, fully addressable and programmatic ad sales platform by 2024 -- when 50 percent of annual revenues from addressable and linear ads will emanate from programmatic transactions -- investigations are underway to create programmatic tech and data retrieval compatible with interactive ad or commerce projects. "That's something we're really excited about," Barnes says. "How we evolve this programmatic (business) to include all those products beyond the traditional ad message unit."

"We want to enable our solutions across all ad types," McGraw adds. "Our road map strategy is to be able to enable whatever kind of ad you're buying."

At this point, what's in McGraw's sights to deliver next is quicker, more precise data delivery to marketers. "We're also thinking about frequency shaping and sequential messaging that's platform-agnostic over time, no matter what platform people consume content on," she notes. "Being able to serve messages in the right sequence at the right time across these platforms."

Content development is the focus of Disney's next virtual Upfront presentation March 23. The third and final presentation will take place May 18.

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