It hasn’t even started, but 2024 is shaping up to be a wild year in TV advertising as innovations in emerging technologies take shape, new streaming inventory comes to the market and rumors swirl about more consolidation among media companies. 

Disney is taking an active role in kicking the year off by presenting its annual Tech and Data Showcase during CES in January. The event—which will be presented live and via stream from the Las Vegas tech conference at 6 p.m. ET on Jan. 10—will reveal Disney’s upcoming innovations for advertisers. In a recent conversation with Ad Age, Rita Ferro, president of global advertising at Disney, teased that these will include shoppable ad formats, “social extensions” and the “gamification of the advertising experience.”

Ferro said her priorities lie in “expanding all of our advertising formats, tech, measurement—anything that has to do with the growth of our streaming businesses,” a sentiment that has echoed across the Mouse House and gained significant attention as CEO Bob Iger toyed with (but ultimately reversed stance on) the potential sale of Disney's broadcast networks.

Ferro said a specific area of interest will be “things that drive business for [advertisers] in certain categories,” and how Disney can use its tech capabilities to create unique products for each. For example, Ferro mentioned potentially developing more tools around data privacy for categories such as pharma and finance, whereas quick service restaurants may be more interested in upped capabilities for sharing promotions that are unique to different local markets.

As Disney takes new consumer products to market, such as its integration of Hulu into the Disney+ interface for bundle subscribers, Ferro said the media company will develop new offerings for advertisers to better capture target audiences. For example, the company announced today the next edition of its “Generation Stream” research initiative that translates audience research into addressable segments for advertisers to buy inventory against. 

The third round of “Generation Stream” is focused on family viewing and the most prevalent viewing behaviors for co-viewers, which can then be used by advertisers to curate messaging. One of the study’s findings, based on approximately 2,500 panel surveys and interviews, is that 47% of families prefer to stream content together, while 41% will break off and view it individually. But for major events, such as live sports or holiday viewing, 77% of families will gather to watch a specific program.  

These insights were translated into four unique audience segments that advertisers can target through Disney’s first-party data: families that gather to stream educational content (which Disney calls “active enrichers”); those that view diverse cultures to inspire conversation (“eclectic connectors”); families that schedule event co-viewing (“ritual relaxers”); and younger families that often choose nostalgic favorites (“selfie escapists”).

“In addition to the evolution of the content, the streaming environment is influencing how audiences are watching TV and especially how they watch together,” Danielle Hydro, senior manager, advertiser insights and performance at Disney, said of the research she led. Hydra added that for advertisers, the research is valuable in decoding new streaming-native audience behaviors. 

Looking forward to the new year, Ferro sat down with Ad Age to discuss major trends in TV advertising, and what changes the industry may experience in 2024. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Disney has begun its beta test for integrating Hulu as a tab on Disney+. How will that create new opportunities for advertisers?

Advertisers are so excited about it, because as you think about your messaging, you have to buy across many apps and many audiences, so the ability to buy one experience, to buy once and deliver everywhere and make sure that it’s de-duplicated and not hitting the same kind of consumer across everything—it allows much more customization of the messaging and the advertising execution around that.

But it also allows us to think about how we’re bringing to market for clients who only want Disney+ because that's the type of customer or consumer they want, or only want Hulu. And then when there’s a bundle subscriber, we’re able to do that. Once the full product rolls out in March, it will be really meaningful in terms of bundle subscriber usage.

When the Disney+-Hulu integration fully launches in March, will there be any new products or audience capabilities available to advertisers specific to that bundle?

It’s too early, we just launched it, so we’re learning a lot. We set realistic expectations around what it will do at the beginning, and across every metric we’re seeing outperformance of those. But it’s still super early. 

As streaming capabilities evolve in areas such as commerce and gaming, how is Disney investing in new formats for advertisers?

We are trying to create new advertising experiences that take into account the trends we’re seeing, and one of those is social conversations. What is the social execution around a streaming experience ad unit and what does that mean for a social extension opportunity?

That’s one; the other one is around commerce. What are the commerce opportunities we’re bringing to the advertising experience within streaming, and being able to, for example, shop a stream.

The third is gamification of advertising experiences. What kind of advertising units or opportunities are we bringing to bear? That’s going to be rolled out as part of our Tech and Data Showcase. And I’m super excited about some of the opportunities we're going to debut there. So I’ll leave it at that, but I'm really talking about the gamification of the advertising experience more than games on the streaming products. 

On shoppable advertising, what insights have you found on audience willingness or even awareness of using shoppable TV advertising?

I think it depends on the experience. The ultimate outcome of a shoppable unit matters differently to different experiences. And so when you think of QR codes, what’s the usage of a QR code and how much do people really transact on that versus a click-to-commerce unit that takes you to a shopping site where you can add it to your basket and purchase. There’s going to be a wide range of shoppable experiences that I think will have different impacts and, by the way, intentionally have different impacts based on the type of marketer or the type of experience that’s being built out by the different platforms. More to come on that at the Tech and Data Showcase for sure. But I think you’ll see very clearly that contextual relevance matters—where the experience appears, whether it’s in content or in an ad pod matters. 

What's the latest on AI? You spoke about ways Disney was exploring uses at our event in May, but is the company investing in any new opportunities for AI in TV?

We’re always looking and exploring ways to improve processes within our business and in that think of repeated processes. So, like, proposal generation—when we think of the types of things that come up every year, and how we make sure that we have ways to improve time to make processes more efficient. We're continuing to explore solutions that actually would add value and allow us to put our human capital against other areas that really require it and need more of a hands-on approach versus mundane processes that are still super necessary to manage the business.

That’s really where I'm spending time from an AI perspective. Obviously, we have machine learning and AI in all of our business models in terms of our streaming platforms and our advertising models, and that will continue to iterate and drive more value over time. But really, in the process, how we operationalize an expanding global advertising business to make the things that are repeatable and not strategic more automated so that we can put our human minds against the most important creative tasks at hand that we need to continue to drive value for.

What are you hearing in the market that, moving into the new year, is going to be important conversations or trends that emerge for advertisers?

One is discoverability of content, and how we’re going to make sure that consumers know where they can find their content. 

You’re going to see consolidation, because there’s a lot of platforms today, and there’s not really demand for the volume of platforms that are out there. And I think a lot of people may have gotten into this space because they saw it as an opportunity in a depressed market in linear to look at other ways to leverage content on different platforms. But I think a consumer has a specific amount of time that they can spend.

The platforms that break through with best-in-class experiences, that are discoverable with a customer journey that’s enjoyable, a content library that’s resonating and advertising experiences that compliment that—that’s what’s going to be winning, and all the other things are going to start to fall to the wayside. You’re going to start to see more of that in ’24 and ’25.