Disney plans to extend Hulu’s ad targeting options to Disney+’s ad tier

By Tim Peterson

Disney debuted Disney+’s ad-supported tier last December with a fairly basic feature set for advertisers. For example, advertisers couldn’t target ads to specific audiences like they can on Disney’s other ad-supported streamer, Hulu. But that’s about to change.

In April, Disney will begin to roll out some of Hulu’s ad targeting capabilities to Disney+, and by July, Hulu’s “full suite of ad products and services” will become available across Disney’s streaming portfolio, said Disney Advertising president Rita Ferro in an interview ahead of the company’s annual Tech & Data Showcase event for advertisers on Jan. 25.

Asked what specific ad targeting capabilities from Hulu will be ported to Disney+, Ferro said, “it’ll be some of the basic stuff: age, gender, some geo-targeting. And then the full suite of targeting in July.” That expanded targeting suite will include the 2,000 audience segments available through the Disney Select first-party data platform — which spans 235 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. to Disney’s media properties and more than 100 million U.S. household-level IDs, she added.

“The targeting thing is probably big for them because they can better monetize the inventory as opposed to us just buying P2+ [the broad audience segment of anyone two years old and older] and there’s so much waste. Now they can make it more valuable. So that will definitely help. It’s important for us to have the same capabilities on Disney+ that we’re now accustomed to on most of the other streamers,” said an agency executive.

The extension of Hulu’s ad products and services to Disney+ is the latest showing of Disney’s push to unify its back-end ad tech operation as the company seeks to automate 50% of its ad sales — a goal that Ferro said Disney is on pace to reach this year. “We’re at 35% right now, and that’s before the full integration of all of these [ad products and services from Hulu],” she said.

Underpinning Disney’s streaming ad tech expansion is the Disney Ad Server, which stems from the company taking full control of Hulu and its ad server in 2019. Disney’s ad server already powers 100% of Hulu’s and Disney+’s ad platforms in the U.S., said Aaron LaBerge, CTO of Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution. “Over the next 12 months, [DAS] will be powering all of our addressable platforms,” he said.

The Disney Ad Server is “the heart of our platform,” LaBerge said, and it is complemented by Disney’s Yield Optimized Delivery Allocation product that balances direct-sold vs. programmatic vs. self-serve ad buys as well as the Disney Real-time Ad Exchange that sells Disney’s ad inventory programmatically (and yep, Disney has intentionally named the two ad tech products after Lucasfilm and Marvel characters).

“We’ve made significant investments in our technology platform to serve ads for the entire company,” LaBerge added.

Now, back-end technology, as the label implies, is typically behind-the-scenes work that can be hard to detect on the surface. But a second agency executive said they have noticed the impact.

“The big thing for …read more

Source:: Digiday