CANNES – Walt Disney in the past decade has expanded video distribution with the launch of streaming services that can reach a broader range of connected devices such as smart TVs and mobile phones. Each of Disney Streaming’s major brands – Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu – has uncovered consumer insights that are meaningful to advertisers.
“Scale is definitely important to advertisers. What makes Disney different is the differentiated products and brands that we have,” Danielle Brown, senior vice president of data enablement and category strategy at Disney Advertising, said in this interview with Sean Cunningham, president and chief executive of VAB.
ESPN+ streams thousands of live sporting events and original sports-related programming. Disney+ has a library of family movies and television programming going back to its founding 100 years ago, along with acquired franchises such as “Star Wars,” Marvel Comics, Pixar Animation Studios and National Geographic. Hulu started as an on-demand platform for recently aired TV shows, and has grown to offer original programming, movies and live television. All of the services now carry advertising, though Hulu and Disney+ still offer ad-free services for a higher subscription price.
“ESPN has a very different audience from Hulu. Hulu has different audiences from Disney+,” Brown said. “The composition of our content and the composition of our audiences really helps advertisers drive scale at incrementality. They’re not really duplicating audience reach when it comes to Disney.”
With last year’s launch of a Disney+ tier that has commercial breaks, the company adopted many of the learnings from Hulu, which was founded in 2007. The same year, Netflix began to transform its video distribution with the launch of a streaming platform that overtook its original business of renting “
“The great thing about Hulu was the innovation. There are natural insights about consumer behavior that we then turned into ad products,” Brown said. “We know that the Disney+ audience is different. We also know that there’s a lot of receptivity to shopping within a streaming service.”
You are watching “The Transformation Of Television: Connected, Addressable & Outcome-Based,” presented by Go Addressable & Teads at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. For more videos from Beet.TV’s Cannes Lions 2023 coverage, please visit this page.
