Dive Brief:

• Disney announced a host of new advertising capabilities at its fourth annual Disney Tech & Data Showcase on Jan. 10, including the ability to buy ads across both Hulu and Disney+ in a single campaign. A bundled service, now in beta, will be available widely in March 2024.
• The company unveiled its first native, shoppable ad format for streaming, Gateway Shop, that will allow viewers to send on-screen products to their second screen without interrupting their program.
• In addition, Disney announced an expansion of its clean room offering, tapped Innovid and Cint for new measurement capabilities and teased Disney's Magic Words, a first-to-market contextual advertising format that uses advanced data.

Dive Insight:

Now in its fourth year, the Disney Tech & Data Showcase helps set the tone for what advertisers can expect from the media giant in advance of its upfront presentation later this year. This week’s presentation, made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, comes as Disney looks to supercharge its advertising offerings and better monetize its portfolio of live TV, streaming and other properties.

"Disney connects our clients to world-class entertainment, sports and programming with proven engagement that cannot be found anywhere else.” said Rita Ferro, president for global advertising at Disney. “Our industry-leading technology and data capabilities, paired with our global scale and reach, allows us to deliver intentional, and impactful experiences to consumers, while driving performance and effectiveness for brands.”

The new Gateway Shop offering furthers the company's efforts to connect content with commerce, building on GatewayGo, a commerce-enabled ad format it launched in 2020 that relied on email, push notifications and QR codes. The new format allows viewers to add items they see in TV and movie programming to their second-screen shopping carts at the touch of a button. 

As the rush for deeper data reserves continues amid the ongoing deprecation of the third-party cookie, Disney also expanded its roster of cloud services providers, adding industry leaders Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The company also teamed with Habu to launch the Disney Portal, which allows clients to stand up a clean room on their own, a process that now takes days and not weeks.

Disney also addressed another of the year's major challenges — the need for better streaming measurement — with new collaborations with Innovid and Lucid Impact Measurement by Cint. The latter's always-on dashboard gives advertisers including 2K Games, The Hershey Company and Josh Cellars access to data on ad recall, consideration, purchase intent and brand favorability.

“We combine decisioning, data, engineering, automation, and measurement, delivering a massive competitive advantage in meeting our advertising partners’ business needs. And having the strongest tech stack in the industry allows us to pave the way for even smarter innovation," said Ajay Arora, senior vice president for commerce, growth and identity at Disney.

Disney continues to grow its ad business through self-service and automation features. Disney Campaign Manager has been used by more than 4,200 brands, and will be expanded globally in tandem with the expansion of the Disney+ ad tier. Additionally, Disney+ and ESPN+ inventory will be available to self-serve domestically this year.

Lastly, the company teased a new contextual ad product, Disney's Magic Words, that uses advanced data to analyze scenes and visuals across its library to tie mood and emotion to advertising messages. The offering will be available to beta partners at this year's upfront and to wider audiences by the end of the year.