Disney Is Constantly In Ad Tech Headlines. But They Aren't Selling Any Ad Tech. What Kind Of Magic Is This?

Disney Flexes Programmatic Muscles At This Year’s Tech & Data Showcase (source: AdExchanger).

Summary:?At Disney's splashy Tech & Data Showcase last week, the company touted its efforts in measurement and programmatic, with its Unified Ad Platform (UAD) taking center stage. UAD is powered by a home-grown ad server, audience graph, and?an algorithmic engine called YODA?(yield optimized delivery allocation) that calculates the best time to serve ads.?

Disney is betting big on UAD to help it improve its targeting, programmatic automation, and measurement. The company predicts that automation will deliver half of its ad spend by next year. And by summer, ad targeting on Disney+ will be on par with Hulu's capabilities, with biddable programmatic coming later this year. Advertiser demand for biddable Disney inventory has skyrocketed 150%, doubling last year's growth, the company said at the event.?

Disney has struck a preferred partnership with EDO to provide outcome-based measurement across Disney's addressable inventory. Disney broadened its work with Samba TV for deduplicated reach and frequency measurement.?Disney is also making moves in identity. Back in July,?Disney integrated with The Trade Desk?and its Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) solution. Last week, we learned that?Unilever is the first to beta test the integration. Its ID graph, Disney Select, now includes:

• 235M unique viewers
• 110M households
• More than 1,800 audience segments.

In addition to TTD, Disney is also talking to other DSPs about integrations.?

Disney also?offers a clean room, which will be interoperable with measurement vendors. It?added VideoAmp's TV viewership data?to its clean room last month, which helped to increase its clean room client base to about 70 advertisers, including all major agency holding companies.

Opinion:?It’s time to admit that maaaaybe we were wrong about Disney? We’ve been predicting for quite some time that Disney will acquire a DSP or SSP in order to monetize their inventory and data, at scale, across the open web. Like, you know, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, on and on and on and on. But it's time for us to let it go?. Disney’s ethos as a company (TV, movies, parks, streaming, etc.) has always been about high quality, highly controlled, Disney-first experiences. With each announcement, it's becoming clearer that this applies to their ads strategy as well.?

Disney only seems to care about monetizing its own assets. In order to do so, Disney seems to be focused on being the most ad-tech?cooperative?publisher in the world instead of selling their own ad tech. They want to monetize their inventory primarily through their own direct demand. More importantly, they will only monetize their data across their own inventory. They are enabling?this Disney-first monetization strategy by making it easy for buyers to access Disney assets through?many external integrations as possible.?

Let’s juxtapose this strategy?with say,?Google's strategy (who did invent the publisher monetization playbook after all). Google uses its ad tech and its data as a trojan horse?to force advertisers to bring their budgets into Google’s ecosystem (“free Google data for everyone, as long as you use our DSP!”), which Google then pushes out across the open web to capture a piece of everyone's pie. On the contrary, Disney creates integrations with external ad tech --?DSPs, clean rooms, measurement solutions, ID graphs, etc. -- to make it super easy for advertisers to bring their budgets into Disney’s ecosystem in order to drive up the competition and?prices for?their own assets.?

This is NOT your standard?big publisher playbook. Especially for a publisher that has so much valuable 1st party, futureproof data from the web, TV, streaming, and offline. But maybe it’s a smart publisher playbook in the current environment, given:

a) the regulatory risks associated with data being monetized freely across the web

b) the increasing strategic value of data collected via a direct relationship with?the consumer

c) the increasing importance of interoperability for marketers

d) the high cost of building and running a parallel in-house ad tech business that is largely duplicative of massive, hard-to-unseat, incumbent ad tech vendors

Listen, this playbook won’t work for every publisher. Disney is a unique beast. Who knows, maybe our original prediction will come true at some point, and Disney will get into open web ad tech more aggressively, by licensing their data to 3rd parties, buying / building DSP or SSP tech, etc. But for now, they seem to be sticking to?their guns.