During Disney's Tech & Data Showcase livestream yesterday, one theme was especially prevalent: changes brought on by the streaming era, whether in automation, privacy or democratization, are happening faster than predicted. As the first stop on Disney's “52-week road to upfront,” the media giant flaunted the ins and outs of its innovations in measurement, data and ad products. 

“This is not a concept, it’s a reality at Disney,” said Christine Chung, director of advanced analytics and clean room solutions, after showcasing one of these innovations—a reminder of the very different TV industry that will present during this spring’s upfront, which will take place on May 16 at New York's North Javits Center.

This year’s Tech & Data Showcase came over a month sooner than 2022’s, as the company is “seeing the marketplace move earlier,” said Rita Ferro, Disney’s president of ad sales, during a LinkedIn teaser for the showcase earlier in the week, also noting that Disney hosted 120 meetings with clients in the first week of January.

Disney’s hour-long event covered an excess of updates—keep reading to catch up on the highlights.

Make ads with Disney tech

With the launch of Disney+’s ad tier, Disney was finally able to put its full-portfolio ad server to the test. Now, rather than selling advertising on Hulu and its other digital platforms separately, advertisers can reach the entire Disney ecosystem with one transaction.

This is also expected to improve Disney’s capabilities to fully control ad formats and delivery, said Chief Technology Officer Aaron LaBerge. An exciting implementation of this, according to LaBerge, is sharing with advertisers technology used in Disney productions such as “The Mandalorian”— which can render realistic environments via robotics, machine learning and AI—to create new opportunities for advertisers to become part of Disney franchises, or perhaps even create primetime-worthy content of their own.

Clean room update 

Disney unveiled its clean room solution 14 months ago. And while Lisa Valentino, Disney’s executive VP of client and brand solutions, admitted the company thought it would be “in the insights phase of a clean room for a year,” she said it has already been adopted by every major holding company—including Dentsu, Horizon, IPG Mediabrands, OMG and Publicis. Over 70 advertisers have also utilized it in planning, buying and measuring advertising with Disney, and the company has expanded access to mid-size agencies.

Executives throughout the showcase emphasized the importance of this privacy-forward tool as many brands nervously seek solutions to crackdowns on cookies. The Mouse House flaunted the scale of its solution supplied by a decade of data from Disney’s Audience Graph, which hosts 235 million audience IDs across 110 million households.

Looking toward the future of addressable advertising and data collection, Valentino advised: “When you own your own tech, you can really own your own destiny.”

Fully automated buying is one step closer

In 2021, Disney launched DRAX, or Disney Real-time Ad Exchange, with the ambition to fully automate half of its ad business within five years. Disney now predicts to reach that goal next year, fueled by a 150% rise in demand for biddable buying.

A real-time server for these biddable transactions is via Disney’s partnership with The Trade Desk, also supplied by Disney’s Audience Graph. At the Showcase, the partners announced Unilever will be the first advertiser to test this capability. But Disney aims to make its capabilities interoperable with more servers, anywhere an advertiser might need them.

Additionally, Disney+ will enable biddable buying and targeting for audiences 18-plus this year, according to the presentation.

“We are already in conversations with several other DSPs,” said Dana McGraw, senior VP of audience modeling and data science, during the event’s Q&A. “We’re leveraging our Audience Graph to serve as a translation layer for whoever, whenever. We’re really thinking about it in terms of how we standardize representation of our inventory in the marketplace.”

Digital-first measurement

Disney also announced how it is moving forward in measurement to address marketers’ evolved needs in a digital-first media mix. Through expanded partnerships with attribution data company EDO and first-party measurement provider Samba TV, Disney will enhance its reportings to clients with metrics for de-duplicated reach and frequency as well as economic indicators, such as purchase intent.

Commerce coming to streaming

Disney is bullish on the strength of its streaming portfolio, joking during the showcase that the company’s outlook spans the timeline of ad-supported streaming from 14-year-old Hulu to infant Disney+. And that’s not just because the company predicts that streaming will make up 50% of all time spent watching TV by 2025, but because it claims that currently, 79% of Disney inventory now comes via CTV devices.

The House of Mouse’s primary goal is for both of its younger streaming platforms, Disney+ and ESPN+, to reach parity with Hulu’s capabilities. According to Mary Strockbine, Disney’s VP, head of streaming, the company will soon be rolling out new ad capabilities, including commerce, to its streaming platforms.