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CANNES, France—Disney is in the midst of a battle for streaming ad dollars, one that has intensified recently as Amazon Prime Video and Netflix have both entered an already-crowded field with competitive ad offerings.
But at the Cannes Lions Festival, Disney took a major step towards making its streaming ad inventory more available to a wider range of advertisers and their adtech partners by making its identifier, officially called “Disney’s BridgeID”, more accessible across the ad industry.
With the move, Disney is targeting “mid-market advertisers,” which it defines as companies that spend between $30 million to $300 million in advertising.
There are about 900 of these advertisers, Disney’s president of global advertising Rita Ferro told ADWEEK, and Disney has identified them as having tremendous growth potential. Disney has traditionally worked closely with huge, heavy-spending advertisers, as well as the large holding companies that buy ads on their behalf. But mid-market advertisers typically work with smaller ad agencies across the U.S., Ferro said.
“It doesn’t mean our main, top 100 advertisers aren’t growing and spending money, but there’s a real significant opportunity for us there,” she said.
Going beyond The Trade Desk
Now, Disney has told ADWEEK it’s greatly expanding BridgeID’s ability to connect with a greater number of ad-buying platforms and measurement companies.
In a cookieless environment, like streaming TV, publishers with big audiences like Disney use identifiers like BridgeID that are tied to their first-party data but stripped of identifying information. These identifiers let advertisers target viewers and measure whether those ads were seen.
But for marketers to reach audiences across the wider media ecosystem, a publisher’s identifier must be able to connect with other companies’ identifiers. Publishers in a cookieless environment that have interoperable identifiers are more able to scale and drive ad revenue.
For the past two years, Disney’s BridgeID has been able to connect with Unified ID 2.0, an identifier created by the ad-buying platform The Trade Desk.
Disney revealed at Cannes that the BridgeID is interoperable with identifiers from three other companies—Experian’s LUID, LiveRamp’s RampID, and Yahoo’s ConnectID—which lets the ad targeting and measurement firms working with those companies access Disney’s streaming inventory and audience.
To use BridgeID, these partners have to use Disney’s clean room, which is a digital environment that ensures that data is matched safely.
One reason that Disney is making its identifier more widely available now is that advertisers have changed how they buy streaming ads. Clients traditionally buy directly from Disney ad sales, but they’re now increasingly buying ads in an online auction.
“We’re starting to see growth in that biddable channel—double-digit growth, quarter over quarter, and we want to enable the least amount of friction possible in order to continue to drive that growth,” Ferro said.
Over the past three years, as Disney has launched a clean room and made it easier to access its first-party data, use of that data has seen triple-digit growth, said Dana McGraw, Disney’s SVP of data and measurement science.
The ad revenue associated with Disney’s first-party data is already in the billions, McGraw said.
If Disney’s bet pays off and more advertisers are encouraged to spend, the company anticipates it will generate additional billions.
