Disney unveiled a host of new and expanded tech solutions at its fifth annual Global Tech and Data Showcase in Las Vegas yesterday, while also announcing that the global monthly average reach of its streaming platforms (Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+) topped 157 million over the past six months. Rita Ferro, Disney’s global advertising president, said that domestically, ad-supported reach on Disney’s streaming properties is now over 112 million.
Several of these announcements focused on data. Disney unveiled ‘Disney Compass’, a new proprietary data platform which gives advertisers centralised access to key audience data and campaign metrics. Compass will also enable advertisers to connect up with data from a number of third-party providers including LiveRamp, Snowflake, VideoAmp, and Affinity Solutions, while agency holding group Publicis has agreed an integration via its CoreAI offering.
Elsewhere on the data front, Disney says it is launching a new AI-based tool for creating lookalike audiences, available within its proprietary clean room. It also announced that existing audience segmentation and targeting tools, Disney Select and Audience Graph, will roll out globally. These tools, which first launched in America, have already gone live in Latin America, and are due to roll out in EMEA soon.
Outside of new data offerings, Disney announced a new live sports-focussed ad offering. The media company will begin selling biddable deals for live sports using its own ad server, which will be available through Google’s DV360, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo’s DSP. Magnite is signed up as the only third-party sell-side partner.
Ahead of Netflix, Behind Prime Video?
Ranking Disney’s latest reach figure against the other major international streaming platforms, the number indicates that Disney sits between major rivals Netflix and Prime Video. Netflix announced in November that its ad-supported tier reached 70 million users monthly globally, while Prime Video said last year its global reach topped 200 million.
But while reach is obviously important to advertisers, it doesn’t tell the whole story. We don’t yet know how this reach translates into inventory across the streamers – which varies based on the intensity of the ad load run by each service, as well as the amount of time the average user spends watching content.
And as Disney noted in a release accompanying its announcement, there’s no standardised way of measuring monthly reach for a streaming service. To calculate its figure, Disney says it looked at the total number of monthly active users of its ad-supported services (defined as any accounts which watched more than 10 seconds of content each month). It then multiplied this by the average number of users based on region and service type – while this varies, the global average is 2.6.
Whether Netflix and Amazon used similar methodology or not is unknown, making it difficult to confidently compare reach across these services.
