entertainment

Disney Hits Launches First Multispot Ad Campaign

The Disney Music Group teamed up with The Escape Pod to roll out the "Magic Happens Here" campaign for the Disney Hits playlist.

Disney Hits is a streaming music playlist that aggregates the most popular and iconic Disney songs from the past 100 years into one location. It averages 90 million monthly streams and is available on all major music-streaming services worldwide.

The two, The Disney Music Group and The Escape Pod, worked with production company Gravity Well Studio to produce the spots. 

This is the first multi-spot major advertising campaign for Disney Hits. The "Magic Happens Her"e spotlights how the Disney Hits playlist adds a little musical enchantment to anyone's day, proving that any moment can be magical.

Rob Souriall, vice president of marketing at Disney Music Group, said the campaign consists of three new spots that initially launch in the U.S. this holiday season and then expand into Canada and the U.K. in 2024.

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These spots are in English, but the company is considering shooting new ones with local casting and language to tell the same story in other countries. 

Marketing Daily caught up with Souriall to talk about the campaign, how the music service works, and who benefits from the ad targeting.

Marketing Daily (MD): Will other media accompany the videos such as search, social, television and radio?
 
Souriall:  We have an always on 24/7/365 mentality with our Disney Hits Playlist. It is our biggest perennial catalog music marketing initiative. The playlist continually builds followers, and streaming engagement continues to rise. We run search and digital, and consistently feed our owned-and-operated social channels with content.

We’ll pulse in and out with television -- broadcast and connected TV -- as well as in-cinema buys throughout the year. We run some out-of-home billboards.

We also have our own branded “Disney Hits” SiriusXM Channel (133). This is similar to the Disney Hits Playlist, but it is programmed like a radio station. The SiriusXM Disney Hits Channel plays all our legendary, timeless Disney hits, but also has specialty shows and interview segments.

MD:  Who is the target audience for these ads?
 
Souriall:  The target audience is broad. The range of music included in the playlist dates back to 1937 and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” all the way to current films like “Wish,” “Encanto,” “Frozen,” “Moana” and “Coco.”

In general, we target families, and moms, thought of as the chief planning and purchasing officer of the household. There are legendary and classic songs that appeal to every demographic -- grandparents, parents, young adults, teenagers, and kids.  We like to refer to this as the musical “Circle of life.” Pun intended.

MD:  Is the playlist aggregated for the listener or can the listener search for songs and create their own playlist?
 
Souriall:  Great question -- and even though there are over 700 million premium music streaming subscriptions across the globe, expected to reach 1 billion by 2027, many people don’t really understand what a playlist is or how it works. My team spends significant time evangelizing and educating.

These new creative spots are all about contextually bringing this story to life.

The Disney Hits Playlist consists of approximately 100 to 120 songs at any given time and is curated by our sales and digital team at Disney Music Group, the music arm of The Walt Disney Company.  We optimize and update the playlist on a weekly basis. As we release new tentpole films, we will add in a few of the new songs.

We receive a ton of data from our partners like Spotify or Amazon. It shows us when consumers skip songs and how long they stay engaged listening. Based on this information, we will remove songs that do not perform well. The audience speaks and we react.

Consumers can’t alter the Disney Hits Playlist. Technically, any premium subscriber on any of the music streaming platforms can select songs and create their own custom playlist. That could take hours, though.
 
We do the work, so fans can simply access the playlist via their streaming service of choice and start listening instantly to the biggest and most popular songs from our beloved Disney films.

The basic proposition is to remind moms just how easy it is to make the trusted, family-safe music of Disney the soundtrack to everyday life moments.

In fact, it’s as easy as asking all of those voice-activated devices in our households to “Play Disney Hits."

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