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'Disney is a technology company' - What's behind the push to have a unified ad tech platform at the mouse house?
00:23:35
Next in Media spoke with Jamie Power, Disney's SVP, Addressable Sales, about ongoing measurement challenges in streaming, what happened with the so-called currency wars, and why it's a big deal that ESPN and Disney are now on the same ad server.
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- [00:00]
A
Fragmented audiences don't have to be fragmented solutions. Elemental TV enables CTV publishers to unlock the full value of their inventory through advanced audience data capabilities, AI powered curation and transparent direct programmatic delivery. By continuously innovating and leveraging cutting edge technology, Elemental TV is driving the evolution of ctv, empowering publishers to maximize revenue and deliver targeted data driven advertising experiences. Ready to see what's next in CTV? Learn more at elemental tv.com this week on Next in Media, I spoke with Jamie Power. She's Disney's SVP of addressable sales. Jamie and I talked about Disney's slew of announcements to ces, particularly those around ad tech and data, and why they believe big media companies need to invest in the same level of buying and targeting options as the world Gardens, even if they might end up competing with other big companies on household grass and unique IDs. Jamie also gave her take on where things stand when it comes to bringing more small brands to TV and why streaming ad measurement remains so challenging. Let's get started. Hi everybody, I'm Mike Shields. Welcome to Next in Media. My guest this week is Jamie Power. She's the SVP of Addressable Sales at Disney. Hey Jamie, thanks for being here.
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B
Hi everyone. And Mike, thank you so much for having me.
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A
Excited to have you. It's great timing. We're post CES early in the year, tons to talk about. Why don't we start with you guys? Had a ton of news at ces. It's wide ranging, we probably can't cover it all. But what maybe you can sum up for like what was the driving force? A lot of new news around targeting and ad opportunities and ad platforms. What's the gist of it all?
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B
Yeah, I mean not to age myself but like I've probably gone to close to 20 cess, like stemming from like working on LG and like hitting the floor that way. And then when I was at Group M, I used to help Irwin Gottlieb with the tours and I mean help. I had like a belt bag full of batteries and if their headsets would go out on the tour I would like swap them out with new batteries. And then to now for me this CES felt the most actionable. Like when I was going like all those years and especially like the Group MD years when I got to see Erwin curate the tour, everything felt like.
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A
Very future flowing, future inspiration. Let's think about this down the road, that kind of thing.
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B
Yeah, this year felt very much like we can do this now. The tools are here and it's like just figuring out like the tools that you actually want to leverage. So I would say this is the fifth time that Disney's done our global Tech and Data showcase, our second time doing it live at ces. And CES just made sense because it's the epicenter of, you know, of technology. Last year, I think the live show focused a lot on our infrastructure and explaining how it worked and making sure agencies and advertisers understood that.
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A
Like setting up the stuff that you're going to need to do all these things you're talking about.
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B
Well, yeah, just making sure that people understood that Disney is a technology company. Right. Like we're a content company, but we're also a technology company and we've invested in the technology to, to make sure that we can deliver meaningful experiences for our fans and our viewers and our audiences. But we wanted to make sure we set up the technology stack and what is possible. And this year it felt way more tangible. So like some of the announcements we went through, obviously the first announcement that Rita gave on Siege, which I think is pretty meaningful, is she gave the global ad supported MAU number monthly active users. I don't like using acronyms because I feel like it confuses people, but that's the first time that an ad supported number was given. And I think that transparency is necessary as more viewership goes over to streaming and agencies are trying to plan. Like the buy side needs to start to have more transparency in order to plan in a, you know, intelligent.
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A
Yeah, and it's hard to get at that kind of number from a third party because it's so multi platform and broken up. Right.
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B
Like, well, there's no uniform methodology. What we're trying to do is first just introduce ad supported, be transparent about the methodology. The these are actual viewers that watched Hulu, ESPN and Disney and hope the industry can come together with a unified methodology. That way everything is apples to apples when buyers and agencies are looking at it.
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A
So what made you feel, first of all, 20 CS's, I don't know if I'm impressed or worried for you, but like now that you've got all this stuff set up, what makes you feel like this is the actionable year? Is it just the industry is ready to roll, the tools are maturing, there's more opportunities? What made you feel like this was a different kind of CES vibe?
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B
I mean, I think we're. Cause we're actually rolling. You know, like a lot of the stuff that we've talked about isn't stuff that you can do in 12 months, 18 months.
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A
It's not theoretical.
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B
It's not theoretical. I'd say everything isn't turnkey and easy, ready to go. You have to put the work in to figure out, like, what you want to test, how you want to test it. We announced Disney Compass, which is our data platform that enables data to be shared however an agency wants to use it. You know, Disney has taken a stance. We are not a measurement company. We do not want to grade our own homework, but we want to enable the measurement. However, which way you want to get it. So using Compass. If an agency wants to integrate Compass into their planning tools so they could understand the deduplicated reach across our three platforms, they can do that. If they want to get the ad logs and the data out from a measurement standpoint, they have the ability to do that and measure it within their ecosystem in their agency tools. That's happening. We're doing it with different agencies and different use cases. Actually, I would say last year at ces, the word was interoperability, right? Like, that was the last word that you heard on every single stage and every single panel. And I think because the industry actually came together and created interoperability, that's why you're seeing all this stuff possible this year. But AI, I would say, isn't a buzzword. And there's many interesting use cases that we're able to action on today. Dina, when she was on stage, talked about Disney Select AI that allows us to. For AI to help generate audiences that we think are going to deliver on your outcomes. I talked about a partnership with public core AI with publicist Sapient. And when they showed me this demo, and, you know, I've been in media, I started in media planning, and when they showed me this demo, I was absolutely speechless and blown away, and it kind of made me want to get back into media. But the premise of using AI for agencies to recommend targets that are going to drive a client's business versus waiting for a client to tell you what the target is, to be able to go to your client and say, I understand your business. And because of your business right now, I think here are three competitive advantages. I can strategically go into and reach these audiences. And then for me, the full circle moment was Disney had the infrastructure to be able to accept it. So they're able to seamlessly build the audiences, send them to us, and then if they wanted to activate them, real time and programmatic.
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A
That's so interesting because I think there is a. And I'm. I'm going off this topic a little bit here made me think of this. The, you know, there's this like debate about whether how. What AI, AI's role is going to be in media planning and optimization. And you're seeing the Googles and Facebooks have these products that come out and are kind of like we'll just do everything, don't worry about it. You give us the target and we'll do it. And then that scares some people or makes them uncomfortable. You're talking about, I think having AI help guide a client towards what the target is and the audience or the audience that they should go after. But you're still having some more control I believe. I guess help me sort that out or whether they. We're going to go to a place where no one, when the media planning and buying is like totally automated versus the way things work now there you're.
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B
Always going to have to have a person like pull the insights out and figure out how to action on them. Like it's not, we're not replacing jobs. I think we are taking away some of the tasks that we don't need to do to free up more time for us to be more thoughtful in what we do. So like that tool, you know, like there's still a person that's you know, in there querying it and building the audience. Like, okay, I want to reach users of X diaper. Okay, great. What is the differentia in the market? Okay, if my budget is X, how many markets could I reach meaningfully? Like that's the type of stuff I'm talking about. It's not like a robot building a meeting.
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A
I have no idea where my ads are going to be. I have no idea my money's going.
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B
Like it's not going to be like it's, it's. You're actually being a little bit more thoughtful. The other thing too is like you have to be a little bit more thoughtful too is it's, it's not just all bottom of the funnel and you need to make sure that you're, you're getting that level of reach as efficiently as possible. Right. And we can talk about that as our data and you know, other publishers data will help agencies inform that versus an agency predicting what a reach curve is. They think of the deduplication across streamers versus us sharing the data in their planning tool so they can do it accurately which needs to happen. If not everyone knows they need to be in streaming but they're not able to plan it in a meaningful way. And the goal hasn't changed since I started media. The goal is to reach an audience as efficiently as possible. And they were able to do that with TV data because tv TV data was syndicated and with streaming data not syndicated with equal methodologies across all the different streamers, it makes it impossible. So you kind of know you need to be there. But do you need to buy 10 streamers? Can you buy three? You know, it kind of depends on if you're trying to get reach or frequency.
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A
Yeah. As much as we, you know, you complained about that old Nielsen was the only game in town era. It was simpler. You hinted at a lot of this with your. The last year was in interoperability was a big theme this year trying to kind of get all these. All these tools and gear. Help me out. There's. There's like a. There seems to be like conflicting philosophies or ways to think about where TV advertising is going. Either there's the. The walled gardens are so big. We all got to come together and have a unified ID, a unified way of selling, or we're screwed versus everybody's going to have their own graphs and own IDs and buying platforms. Are those two things in conflict? Do you agree with that or how do I think about this?
- [10:35]
B
Well, I'll tell you how I think about it. Like, I never want technology to be a barrier for why someone can't buy Disney the way that they want to buy. Right. An agency is going to be thoughtful, they're building plans and we want to make sure they're able to deliver and execute across the entire ecosystem. You know, things that we have done to make sure that we provide openness to the marketplace. You know, we have a bridge ID that is interoperable again with the whole market. So it means it's, you know, you can buy on the bridge id, but it's interoperable with UID too. It's interoperable with pair with some of the smaller DSPs. Also, like if agencies have audience frameworks, it's interoperable there. It's also interoperable with measurement companies because I think that's another piece like you want to make sure that you can match off of something. That way you have audience scale for both targeting and then also measurement. I think the measurement piece sometimes gets lost because everyone wants to say, yeah, you can measure us with all these different measurement companies, but CTV being a new form of media, you need to make sure that the signals are there for accuracy. So anytime that we certify a measurement partner, we're making sure that they're accurate. Some of the measurement partners, when we did our first match with them, they were 10%, 12%. And if someone's going to put in the time to, you know, identify how they want to measure a campaign and what they want to learn and then the results aren't accurate, like, that's not something that we're comfortable with. The fact that we have our own identity graph helps us make sure that we can do high fidelity matching. We can exchange multiple signals. You know, if you're working with one identity graph, typically an identity graph has one signal that they're strong on. We are strong on multiple signals. So if one signal isn't working, we'll send multiple signals to make sure we're getting that match rate up. So I do think, you know, identity does play a critical role. Does everybody need their own identity graph? Probably not, but everyone needs to figure out a way to, in a privacy focused way, be able to leverage identity to get us accuracy in the market.
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A
That sounds pretty simple.
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B
Well, it isn't really that hard.
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A
No, no. I think it probably sounds more complicated than it is. And you're right. There's probably only so many players that need to go all, all in on building these graphs. But once, once you do the work up front, it sounds like it's very, it's very actionable. On that note, you guys have talked about for several years your goal that you set ambitious goals to make, you know, X percentage of your transactions programmatic. So that's very positive in terms of moving dollars to this marketplace. But how much of CTV is. Is it, you know, truly digital? Like, and it's targeting today versus where you want it to be, where it's super addressable and like digital versus, you know, mimicking what, what's worked in, in linear television.
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B
Yeah. I mean, I would say probably for the least 10 years, maybe even 15 years, CTV has been promised to be the best of TG and digital.
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A
Right.
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B
Like it was TV and digital. TV and digital. It's the best you have to be at ctv. I don't know that we got there. I think we're finally getting there and making good on that promise because now we're finally able to take the targeting and measurement from digital and then the content from television. And I also think as you're seeing live viewership spike in ctv, that was like the final piece that needed to happen in order to bring it together and make good on that promise. From a targeting standpoint, actually, more than 75% of campaigns use targeting more than Demo. So I would say it makes good on that promise. The other thing I would say is that even if you're targeting just demo, you're only getting that demo. You know, with linear television, you're not just getting adults 20 times.
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A
It's still better. Yeah, it's still advanced. We sometimes forget that it's still an advancement.
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B
Yeah. And then the last thing I would say to make that promise of, you know, the best of both worlds coming together is ad formats. And as you're seeing like live viewership start to go to streaming, and live sports specifically go to streaming, you know, it's not easy to do and you know, we know that because we've been doing that for a long time. But I think from an ad format standpoint, when viewers are in CTV, they're expecting more than a 32nd unit. They're expecting to be able to engage on their terms. You know, if they want to hit pause and figure out how to shop something, they want to be able to do it. If they want to be able to play a game, you know, if they want to expand the ad and learn more, they kind of want to do things on their terms. So it's just making sure that there is the ability to do that. And then also too of those formats, we want to make sure that they're scaled across all publishers. That way when someone's trying to buy again, they could buy holistic audience, holistic ad format right across the entire ecosystem and then be able to kind of, you know, measure it. I would say too, from like a measurement standpoint, like the fact that we are in 35 different dsps allows you unified targeting. Also too, we've enabled measurement in all our DSP partners so they're able to get that cross publisher look.
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A
You mentioned how much more live viewing is happening in streaming, particularly sports. I have a couple of questions about that. But you made an announcement about biddable sports ads. What tells people what that is and what's behind that move?
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B
Yeah, I mean, as the audience shift. Right. The technology is being used differently. So if you think the way that like traditionally you're bidding on, whether it's like entertainment or you're bidding on our like VOD library content, it's a very different experience than sports where you're having like a high concurrency of bids, all happening in a short period of time. Well, a couple things are happening. You know, we saw around the corner, we knew that this was coming. We wanted to make sure we were making the investments to make sure that we're delivering on what our audiences and our fans expect in live. So we are moving everything over to the Disney Ad server. So ESPN will be on the Disney Ad server in February. And what that enables is more like more volume, more scale of biddable sports. We've certified the trade desk, Google, Yahoo, DSP and also Magnite. These are some of our partners. We also believe that they're making the investments to make sure that, you know, their technology is capable of scaling in these, in these live moments. And the fact that we're on our own ad server gives us kind of the control of how, when and where ads deliver. You know, we only stack end to end, including the delivery of the ads. So that helps us make sure that it's going to be a seamless experience for our viewers.
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A
A couple questions coming out of that. You talk about things we, we've been talking about in this industry for a long time. There, there's this, even before streaming was a big deal. This, like, we're going to be able to have dynamic ad insertion even in live programming. And it's going to have a bazillion advertisers we able to bid at the same time. And you'll, you and I will see different things. Even as sports has come to streaming, it's been pretty traditional in terms of the advertising makeup. Even with Amazon, it's. It looks like an NFL game. And that's great. Like, there's great money in that, I guess. Are we going to a place where we're going to have, you know, dynamic bidding in sports where there's a bazillion advertisers, or does that never make sense? Because the value of these live events is these, for these huge brands that want to reach everybody at once.
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B
I mean, I think it's going to be, it's going to be a balance. You know, I think some of our inventory will, will be sold by large or bought by large advertisers. And then there's going to be some that want to kind of like come in at real time for these like lightning in a bottle moments or unexpected moments. It could be a team that they're aligned with. It could be a team that their competitor and it's overtime, right, that they weren't expecting. And all of a sudden like you can pull your laptop out on a Saturday and get into the game or a Thursday night, depending on the sport. So I think that what this allows is it allows across all of our marketplaces for clients to compete kind of like in a fair marketplace a lot.
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A
Again, Another big theme lately is, and it's been talked about for a long time, let's make TV advertising's pie bigger and there's all these self serve platforms. Everybody wants to get those small businesses and DTC brands. Right. What are you seeing now? Is it, is that happening slowly? Is it what's going to kind of drive that growth? Are there too many options? Like what does that look like right now?
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B
So we launched our self service platform about four years ago in totality of Disney, you know we have about 14,000 different advertisers. We probably have like 8 or 9,000 advertisers on self service. Again they're much smaller advertisers but it allows them, you know, for a local florist to be able to watch the bear, you know, in key markets that are key to her. Right. It could be a couple zip codes and see that spot come up. It's pretty powerful from a self service standpoint. I think there's two use cases for it. Like it's. It's that use case for an SMB to be able to come on buy a campaign. It's measurable, they can see it. You know, everything's in the platform, all the measurement is there and we provide the ability for them to measure it to a lift in web traffic. Right. So we're giving them some attribution and helping them understanding how their business is growing. The other use case that I do think is interesting is purely just to look at it as a mechanism to create operational efficiencies for Disney. So instead of creating an IO and booking it that way, what if there was a world where we could build it in our self service platform, you know, more efficiently, a little bit faster, send it over to the agency directly through their tools like Media Ocean for them to be able to get the buy that way? I mean, I think so that's not.
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A
The florist that's like a big brand just cutting out a lot of the paperwork.
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B
Cutting out the paperwork, yeah. And just putting everything I think a little bit more efficiently through technology. I think that would be a use case that we'll start to see trend up this year as the self service platforms get more connections like the connections that matter.
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A
Do you think the growth in generative AI is helping the like the creative was always a barrier for these smaller businesses. Is that changing?
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B
I mean I think it'll definitely help. Yeah. Like if you don't have a creative and gen AI can take your social creative and turn it into something that is relevant for streaming I think that definitely helps. You know, I think those tools also help, like, even for us, like, we, we still have a human approve every single piece of our creative, but if we're using AI assisted, like approval of creative, it allows us to have AI check, like, is it built to the appropriate specific. Right. Like, can they transcode the script versus having someone have to watch it multiple times to see what they're saying. So that's just ways that help us go faster and create more accuracy, but it's not taking away a human's job.
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A
Last thing, Jamie, the. You mentioned this a few times. We're talking so much about all these targeting tools and buying platforms. Measurement is still a hugely important, big challenge. It feels like sometimes we had. We went crazy over the currency wars a couple years ago and there's so much hype and it's going to change everything. Maybe this is just a. The PR wars have died down, but it feels like it's fizzled a little bit. There hasn't been a sea change seemingly. Where do things stand right now?
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B
Our, like, you know, our focus is always going to be on our customers and making sure they have what they need. So, you know, we are always making sure. I mean, compass is a mechanism for us to give them data that they need to be able to, you know, plan, measure and, or, you know, accurately, you know, at scale. So it does seem like it's fizzled. You know, we are willing and open to give the marketplace whatever they need. I think we've also invested in always on measurement to make sure that. Or attribution. Right. So that you can measure it all the way down the funnel. So we're trying to provide them the data to show us the efficacy of each campaign. Is it working? Is it not working? How do you make the next campaign work harder? And then from a transactional standpoint, you know, like the marketplace, we will wait and see how we can support our customers as we move forward. But it does. I agree with you. It does seem like it's fizzled a.
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A
Bit, even just in the, in the. We're constantly looking at the gauge numbers from Nielsen. Like, that's you. You would think someone emerged by now with an alternative. And it's just, it's. It's in a weird limbo. Jamie, awesome conversation. Great stuff. Let's. Let's do this again sometime. But thanks so much for your time here.
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B
All right, thanks for having me.
- [23:22]
A
A big thanks to my guest this week, Disney's Jamie Power and my partners at Elemental tv. If you like this week's episode. Please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more on what's Next in Media. Thanks for listening.