More subscribers and more bundling

This week’s five stories cover TV (Disney’s new subscriber numbers, and Amazon’s shoppable TV formats), searching on TikTok, new AI tools for Meta, and how translation can help Reddit grow internationally.

Disney adds more subscribers, and teases a bundle deal

More quarterly results - Disney+ added over 6m paid subscriptions in the last three months, taking them up to over 117m in total. While this is much smaller than Netflix (250m) and Amazon Prime (‘over 200m’), other good news was that its ‘entertainment’ streaming services - without the sports - were profitable for the quarter, and they are on track to be profitable across all their streaming by Q4, a very important milestone.

A couple of days later they announced a forthcoming bundle deal with Warner Bros Discovery , that will offer US viewers the ability to also get content from WBD channels, most notably Max, (aka HBO). This seems like a very good move, although details like pricing are still unknown. Disney also announced a partnership to use Walmart’s shopper data for its connected TV targeting on Disney+ and Hulu. It is going to be a pivotal year for TV!

Shoppable ads are coming to Amazon Prime Video

Amazon made nearly $50bn in ad revenue in the last 4 quarters, and, having added ads to Prime Video earlier this year, they have started the logical next step of trialling shoppable ads, with three new formats. The ads - a carousel, a brand trivia quiz, and one that will appear when viewers pause - will all be interactive and potentially let people get discounts, send items to their phone, and to their shopping baskets. While their more traditional TV ads show how Amazon is moving into branding and a ‘full funnel’ approach, these could be very effective in directly driving sales; when I am watching Prime on my TV they know my address, my payment details and so on.

TikTok promotes the value of brand discovery

Some good stats on how people use the platform: 61% say they discover new brands there, either by swiping on ads to see more content, tapping to visit profile pages and more, or actively searching for brands and retailers. Apparently 29% of users actively visit the platform to search for a brand or retail account, and what we have seen through our own data is that some terms - particularly relating to music and other elements of culture - can have as many searches here as on the search engines. However it often seems to be a different sort of search - not necessarily looking for answers for specific questions, but looking for inspiration and information about certain topics.

Meta is introducing more AI tools for campaigns

Meta has boosted its AI ad creation capabilities for marketers. Previously it was possible to create backgrounds for pictures, but now they will let people create the full image - for example offering variations to the original creative work, created from text prompts. It will also be possible to add text overlays to the images, in a choice of fonts, and also adapt images to fit the ratios needed to fit into ad units. They are also enhancing text creation, with the ability to learn and adapt to a brand’s tone of voice. All of these tools will be rolled out in due course, via Advantage+, their very popular performance suite.

& finally - Reddit is testing AI translations

Reddit is huge - over 80m daily users, and 300m weekly users - but it is still almost entirely in the English language, which is one reason why 80% of the traffic is from the US. One way to help it grow further would be to make it available automatically in other languages, and this is something they are testing with the help of AI. They are currently working on a test to translate the whole platform to French, including indexing for Google when people search in French, and Spanish is coming next.