Disney introduced an ad-supported tier of Disney+ last December with a fairly basic feature set for advertisers. For example, advertisers could not target ads to specific audiences like they could on Disney’s other ad-supported streamer, Hulu. But that’s about to change.

Disney Advertising President Rita Ferro further said in an interview that in April, Disney will begin rolling out some of Hulu’s ad targeting capabilities to Disney+, and that by July, Hulu’s “full suite of advertising products and services” will be available to Disney+. will be available in the streaming portfolio of of the company’s annual Tech & Data Showcase event for advertisers on Jan. 25.

When asked which specific ad targeting capabilities of Hulu would be ported to Disney+, Farrow said, “It would be some basic things: age, gender, some geo-targeting. And then the full suite of targeting in July. That expanded targeting suite will include 2,000 audience segments available through the Disney Select first-party data platform – spanning 235 million monthly unique visitors in the US to Disney’s media properties and more than 100 million US household-level IDs, he said. Told.

“The targeting thing is probably bigger for them because they can monetize the inventory better as opposed to just buying P2+ [the broad audience segment of anyone two years old and older] And there’s a lot of waste. Now they can make it more valuable. So it will definitely help. It is important for us to have the same capabilities on Disney+ that we are now accustomed to with other streamers,” said an agency executive.

The expansion of Hulu’s advertising products and services to Disney+ is the latest display of Disney’s push to unify its back-end ad tech operations as the company seeks to automate 50% of its ad sales — a goal that Ferro said that Disney is on pace to reach this year. “We’re at 35% now, and that’s before full integration of all these [ad products and services from Hulu],” He said.

Underpinning Disney’s streaming ad tech expansion is Disney Ad Server, which stems from the company taking full control of Hulu and its ad servers in 2019. Aaron LaBarge said that Disney’s ad server already powers 100% of Hulu and Disney+’s advertising platforms in the US. CTO of Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution. “Over the next 12 months, [DAS] will power all of our addressable platforms,” ​​he added.

The Disney ad server is “the heart of our platform,” LaBerge said, and it’s complemented by Disney’s Yield Optimized Delivery Allocation product that balances direct-sell versus programmatic versus self-serve advertising, as well as Disney real-time . The ad exchange that programmatically sells Disney’s ad inventory (and yes, Disney intentionally named two ad tech products after Lucasfilm and Marvel characters).

LaBerge continued, “We have made a significant investment in our technology platform to drive advertising for the entire company.”

Now, back-end technology, as the label implies, is usually behind-the-scenes work that can be difficult to identify on the surface. But an executive at a second agency said he has seen an impact.

“The big thing for them is the momentum we’ve seen over the last two years, the momentum in the last year and the last three months into this year in terms of streamlining operations going forward and consolidating their disparate assets ,” said another agency executive. Specifically, this agency executive cited Disney’s ability to simplify the process of finding audiences in its ad inventory supply pool.

This capability comes in handy when it comes to managing the dynamics of supply and demand for Disney+’s ad-supported tier. Ferro declined to say how many Disney+ ad-supported subscribers the company has earned so far, but asked if the company has run into any under-delivery issues like Netflix, with nascent advertising similar to With the -supported level, he said it is not.

Ferro said, “I think the unique thing that’s different for Disney than Netflix in this particular situation is that we have an entire streaming ecosystem beyond Disney+, so we can look at it in a more holistic way.” able to manage with.”

Translation: If Disney+’s slots for advertisers were running low, Disney could redirect campaigns to Hulu or other inventory sources (with advertisers’ approval).

Agency officials said they haven’t encountered ad delivery issues with Disney+, but the first agency executive said, “We’ve heard them say things like they want to shift spending to Disney+ for some advertisers.” And want to make room for other advertisers to diversify. Creative ad rotations are what people are looking for.” This executive also said that Disney has not shared numbers with advertisers on how many ad-supported subscribers Disney+ has or how many people their ads have reached on the streaming service.

A Disney spokesperson confirmed the discussion of the ad spend change. “Remixing is all but normal for us. All these practices are aligned with our commitment to a high quality viewer first experience. The beauty of our 100+ advertisers ensures that we have the diversity, volume and versatility of client categories and creative talent, which sets the stage for a better viewing experience – and essentially helps maintain our low-frequency cap,” he said. A second Disney spokesperson attributed this distribution flexibility to the company’s ad tech stack. as enabling and said the company does not share subscriber numbers outside of its quarterly earnings reports.

It’s likely to be all over this year’s annual TV advertising upfront marketplace. As part of its advance pre-planning process, Disney held more than 120 meetings with advertisers, agencies and technology vendors during CES. Now it’s following up on those meetings with the Tech & Data Showcase and, later, expanding Hulu’s advertising products and services to further automate Disney’s advertising sales. And a pillar of Disney’s upfront pitch this year appears to be selling advertisers on campaigns that can be automated to go broad across Disney’s streaming portfolio — including Disney+ — and drill down to particular audiences. can go.

“People have this expectation that Disney should deliver our full suite of products,” Ferro said. “And so we wanted to make sure we got that right. Disney+ is part of our fully integrated first-party data offering, and so to be able to turn that and really deliver against what kind of we have Hulu, that’s the plan. All the work’s done. And we’re going to be able to roll it out basically as part of what we do in this upfront for next year — the scale of all of that as well as the full scope of ad formats and all of the innovations that we’ll be launching — we’re going to publish that now to the full platform. That’s the beauty of having everything on a single ad server.”