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- Disney executives touted the reach of its newly unified ad sales portfolio, which brings together brands like ABC, ESPN, Freeform, FX, and National Geographic, in an advertiser event with ad-tech firm The Trade Desk in New York in August.
- The legacy media giant said it can offer diverse audiences at an alluring scale.
- It also suggested its ad sales platform, across linear TV and digital, reaches more people each month than either Google or Facebook.
- The event centered on the challenges of buying and selling advertising in live events programmatically, and promoted new tools from The Trade Desk to manage those issues.
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Disney, the proud new owner of TV networks FX and National Geographic, is on the road unifying its ad sales operations and inventory across all of its TV networks and digital platforms, including ABC, Freeform, and ESPN, which used to be sold to advertisers separately.
Starting in October, most of Disney’s ad inventory will also be available to buy programmatically through a single ad stack.
Executives from Disney and one of its demand-side-platform partners, The Trade Desk, laid out how advertisers and media buyers should think about the new Disney in an August presentation to advertisers in New York.
Disney said it now has more than 11,000 TV shows across ABC, Freeform, FX, and National Geographic.
The company also touted the thousands of live events it produces on ESPN every year.
All of that content will be available to advertisers to buy programmatically in the fall.
Disney is unifying its ad-tech stack through Google’s ad manager. By October 2019, executives said most Disney ad inventory — with the exception of its content on Hulu, which is still to be integrated — will be available programmatically, though a single ad server and ad stack.
Disney said its ad portfolio can reach almost any audience, including demographics like women, millennials, and African Americans.
“There’s not an audience that Disney doesn’t hit anymore,” Matt Barnes, senior director of programmatic strategy at Disney, said in a phone interview following the event. “It really allows us to scale and compete.”
Live sports, some of Disney’s most alluring programming, is mostly watched on the weekends, Disney said.
The majority of ad impressions for Disney’s live sports happen on the weekends, particularly Saturday night, Nelson said.
“We don’t want you to think it’s fraud, we don’t want you to think these huge influx of traffic is not viable, and we want to make sure that you get the best games of the week,” Nelson said.
The companies advised advertisers to plan ahead for the unpredictable nature of live events.
The presentation, billed as part of a “bootcamp strategy session,” included a few pieces of parting advice for the programmatic media buyers in the audience.
Sims at The Trade Desk recommended leaving room in budgets to jump on live events, especially sports. Some college football games might not look like important matchups at the start of the season but could become defining moments as the season progresses, he said.
He also suggested planning ahead for spikes in inventory during live events, and being thoughtful about how often the automated campaigns are set up to deliver those ads.
- Read more about how Disney is approaching advertisers:
- Disney’s new pitch to advertisers touts its unified ad inventory and shows how it’s using Disney Plus and ESPN Plus to its advantage
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