On Tuesday, The Walt Disney Company will hold its annual star-studded Upfront presentation at the North Javits Center in New York City.
This year’s event will highlight Disney as a global advertising force at the intersection of streaming, entertainment, and sports. Combining best-in-class storytelling with advanced technology and data-driven solutions, Disney will also showcase exciting announcements about its unrivaled content portfolio across sports, entertainment, and live programming.
To showcase how Disney utilizes its strong portfolio of content that reach consumers across a variety of distribution channels, we spoke with Rita Ferro, Disney’s President of Global Advertising.
As is typically the case, the Disney upfront is chock full of announcements. What can we expect from this year’s showcase?
You’re going to see the power of The Walt Disney Company in its full splendor on stage with a real focus on the things that marketers are looking for, which is growth in sports, growth in streaming, and a continued investment around the tentpoles on broadcast and cable that really move their business.
We’ve seen this year that college football really drove a ton of upside and opportunity across our portfolio. It was the new format, it was having the SEC on ESPN, it was College GameDay and that cast that sits at the desk, which is unbelievable to watch them interact live from the locations where the fans are.
For us that is really the most important message, which is: because we’re one Disney and we go to market together, we have the unique offering of the most important sports, the most important live events, the largest scale in premium streaming, and that offers the greatest flexibility for brands as they want to make sure that they can manage their advertising dollars and growth around their business.
Now, of all those things, what do you think is the biggest differentiator for Disney in the advertising space?
It’s really two. First, it’s the size and depth and breadth of our sports portfolio and the rights that we have, which are really driving growth and conversation, and it’s the scale in streaming and premium streaming. Entertainment is driven by streaming. The dollars continue to move there. There’s more people launching AVOD [Ad-supported Video on Demand] tiers across the marketplace and competitive platforms, but we still have the shows that resonate with audiences and the franchises that are winning all the awards. And that continues to be a really important consideration when people think of brand safe environments and putting their brands where audiences are coming to watch.
And sports is a massive driver of marketing funds and dollars. Which brings me to our second differentiator: We have close to 70 multiyear deals today and more in the works. Clients are wanting to spend more time where brands are showing up, and it’s live. And live is a big differentiator in the marketplace right now, which is why even ABC, when you think of all of the award shows from Oscars to Country Music Awards, to New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, The Bachelor, all of those shows that bring brands in that allow them to engage audiences at scale in real time, drive social conversation, search — all the things that matter to marketers.
Disney has unmatched scale both in terms of its consumer touchpoints and content offerings. What does that scale mean in terms of Disney’s audience engagement?
It’s super important because that means when consumers come to the platform, they can find something they want to watch and continue to spend time finding new content, new experiences. We know having scale matters because the way brands buy, they want to give an advertising message to a consumer, but they want to manage how many times that consumer sees a message.
So, if you have a platform with limited scale in streaming, for example, then you very quickly run out of opportunities for brands to show up thoughtfully. Because they’ll send their creative message once or twice and then you’ve moved on to the next opportunity that’s not on their platform because they don’t have the scale.
On the sports side, it continues to drive bigger opportunity because we have so many brands that want to be there in the same category. So, when you think of fast food or autos or beauty categories, we work with 20, sometimes 30+ brands in those categories. So, to have scale at our level allows you to work with all of them efficiently. If you are a very small brand or a very small platform, you wouldn’t have the bandwidth to do that.
Disney — helped by the strength of ESPN — is a leader in sports distribution, especially in the areas of women’s, college, and niche sports. What are the benefits for Disney in having such an industry leading sports portfolio?
Oh, it’s a game changer, right? We are the sports destination for sports fans, for brands, and how we make partnerships happen in the marketplace. And women’s sports, that you mentioned, in particular. We’ve been in that business for years. While everybody else is getting in the game with women’s sports, ESPN has been a long-time advocate and supporter with over 65% of live women’s sports rights on our platform.
The live games are what moves advertising dollars. And we own that category outright. We are the experts. We’ve been in it for years. And more and more brands are coming to look for female sports athletes across our platform and to invest in that space.
And you talked about the college football championships across women. We have all of the ones that matter. So while basketball and soccer are awesome, we also have softball and lacrosse and volleyball and gymnastics. All of these sports that have tremendous audiences and brands want to be where audiences are, and female consumers are important consumers in terms of many brand categories.
How is technology that we utilize for our advertising partners — such as our recently rolled out biddable ad tech advancements — a difference maker when it comes to advertising?
That biddable roll out was really important because more and more sales cycles are becoming shorter. The Upfront period is a time where people make reservations, it’s a futures market. So, you’re making reservations against big tentpole opportunities, big things that you don’t want to miss, right? And if you don’t buy now, they might not be available in real time.
But then there’s a significant amount of money that moves in real time and biddable allows you to apply the insights about your customers and your brands, match it with the platforms, brands, data, and be able to really target for outcomes that you’re looking for.
And so, enabling biddable in live environments when so much of our supply is now live. When you think of not only sports, but broadcast, really is going to allow brands to spend in different ways and allow us to work with different demand side platforms in the marketplace to really drive fill, which ultimately drives yield and price up.
Disney has so much to look forward to this year, such as the launch of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer offering. How does this year’s Upfront presentation set the stage for Disney’s advertising business going forward?
It starts to talk about the importance of technology. We are an incredible storytelling company. We are also an incredible technology company with innovation at its core, and we want to enable fans to watch and consume on whatever platform they want, wherever they want, with surrounding experiences that intuitively speak to not only their live, but social, how they engage around ancillary behaviors: shopping, search, streaming, anything that they want to do around that.
When you think of even fantasy or sports betting for a sports consumer, the ability to have that all in one place personalized for you as a consumer, that’s game-changing for our business. That’s all enabled through the technology investments we’ve made. And so we continue to grow and accelerate in that space, and that’s only going to enable a bigger opportunity to work with brands in the future.