Premium storytelling has always been central to Disney’s streaming experience. As audiences increasingly spend more time on Disney’s streaming services, the company’s advertising technology has evolved alongside them. Over the past year, Disney has expanded its suite of first‑party advanced ad experiences to Disney+, giving advertisers new ways to engage audiences while preserving the quality and experience that viewers expect on Disney’s platforms.
At the foundation of this work is the Disney eXperience Composer (DXC), Disney’s internal creative platform for building, delivering, and measuring interactive ad formats. DXC enables teams to rapidly test, iterate, and scale, allowing new ad experiences to move from concept to launch without compromising the viewer experience.
Unlocking Premium Experiences on Disney+
The first format to launch on Disney+ was Gateway Go in April 2025, which presented viewers with offers or reminders they could act on with the simple click of a button via push notifications, emails, or QR codes. Early results demonstrated strong engagement, with performance exceeding industry benchmarks by more than 60%.
Building on learnings from this initial launch, Disney introduced Pause Ads on Disney+ in October 2025. Pause Ads appear when a viewer pauses content, creating a natural opportunity for brand messaging without interrupting the story.
Using our existing Pause Ad as a foundation, Disney launched Pause+ in winter of 2025, extending the core platform to include richer interactive capabilities, including Billboard, Trivia, and Carousel. These formats empower advertisers to tailor creative to a range of objectives, from brand storytelling to purchase consideration. Performance analysis from beta campaigns showed that Pause Ads are strong drivers of brand awareness, while Pause+ formats generate deeper engagement and interaction, reinforcing and amplifying impact across a connected measurement loop. In beta testing, Pause+ Trivia delivered brand recall at 10 times industry benchmarks, while Billboard produced double‑digit lifts in message association and unaided brand awareness.
In early 2026, Disney further expanded its DXC format portfolio with the launch of Ad Selector on Disney+. Ad Selector empowers viewers to choose the video creative they want to watch, driving the highest engagement rates across any DXC format by putting control in the hands of the audience.
Together, these launches bring a full suite of first‑party DXC ad formats to Disney+, unlocking new opportunities for advertisers across a broad portfolio of content, including general entertainment, franchises, sports, and news. These formats enable advertisers to expand their storytelling in more interactive and personalized ways, while driving both brand and performance outcomes.
Disney’s Innovation at Scale
“What sets this work apart is not just the breadth of formats, but the speed at which they were brought to market,” said Alex Combs, VP, Product Management – Ad Platforms for Disney Entertainment and ESPN. “Each release informed the next, enabling teams to achieve parity across platforms and scale rapidly while maintaining high creative and performance standards. By combining platform flexibility with a viewer‑first design philosophy, Disney is laying the foundation for the next generation of premium advertising in streaming.”
