How Disney is nearing its goal to automate 75% of ad sales by 2027

By Tim Peterson  •  October 1, 2024  •

“Of the streaming dollars that came in, of those billions of dollars, more than half of them are transacted programmatically,” Disney’s svp of addressable sales Jamie Power said on stage during the Digiday Publishing Summit in a session that served as a live recording for the Digiday Podcast.

A catalyst to the growth of Disney’s automation efforts this year was the parity that the company has created in making the breadth of its streaming inventory available for purchase programmatically. That includes, more recently, its interactive ad formats.

“Once we finally were able to enable them, within six weeks the spend was eight times the spend than the year before,” Power said.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

The beauty of back-end infrastructure

One of the beauties of having our own tech stack is we actually this year will have the ability to take an ad, publish once and distribute to all of our endpoints.

Audience reach across Disney’s streaming portfolio

If you extended your campaign to Hulu on Disney+, it expanded the reach of the campaign 40%, and the duplication between people watching the Disney+ content was 5%. So it just shows that people are going to different apps and different environments for different reasons.

Programmatic guaranteed deals vs. biddable buying

Last year or the year before last, we were 30% biddable and 70% PG. This year it flipped. The biggest learning there was the [account executives] and the sales team have to treat it more like a campaign. Biddable, it’s not ‘set it and forget it.’ You’re not setting up the deal ID and walking away from it. You still have to have the conversation with the client of how much money do they want to run through this, what is the audience, so you can understand how much inventory is against it.

Big bucks in biddable

We’re seeing some of the biggest advertisers in the world activating 100% biddable now with us. Some of them are spending almost $100 million a year in biddable environments.

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