• by Wayne Friedman , March 2, 2021

Amping up its cross-platform data efforts, Disney Advertising Sales held a recent new industry event -- Disney Platform Tech Showcase -- to highlight its new single unified advertising effort.

“This new way of doing business will be optimizable in real-time through our programmatic offerings,” stated Lisa Valentino, executive vice president of client solutions/addressable enablement of Disney Advertising Sales .

She adds: “The buys will be data-enabled with precision targeting and built on Disney’s audience graph that can be complemented with marketers' own data.”

Disney Advertising Sales expects higher than 80% higher programmatic revenue in 2021, and forecasts programmatic sales will account for up to 50% of Disney’s addressable and linear TV revenue by 2024.

Over the past year, Disney Advertising Sales has seen 1,000 net new clients buying across the Disney Platform via programmatic business.

Much of this comes from Disney’s first-party data, Disney Select, which can be shared with marketers.

Rita Ferro, president, Disney Advertising Sales, stated that it gives marketers “the ability to measure campaigns to optimize media buys across screens. We are pushing innovation on multiple levels.”

With Disney Select, marketers can target first-party segments including behavior, household characteristics and psycho-graphics.

Already, Disney has made gains with data-enabled deals. Disney ad campaigns using data of any type to target audiences increased 56% year-over-year and 110% in revenue growth.

In addition, Disney is also starting up its own programmatic business -- Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX), a premium video header-bidding solution. “It flattens the waterfall and gives parity to all deals, delivering ultimate choice and control to clients while maximizing their ability to scale campaigns.”

With device-based third-party cookies on the outs, Disney is looking to raise the profile of its identity metric -- Disney Audience Graph.

This builds on its recent launch of Disney Hulu XP, “the first step to convergence at Disney,” where advertisers can buy once and deliver to audiences across Hulu and Disney’s addressable inventory.

The Disney Platform Tech Showcase was held February 23 for clients.