Meet The Women Bringing Disney Streaming Advertising to the World
As Walt Disney continues to push advertising in its streaming business, Rita Ferro is expanding her role within The Walt Disney Company.
With Disney set to launch advertising tiers of Disney+ in Europe next month, and other global markets next year, Ferro is being elevated to president of global advertising for Disney. She will now have direct oversight of the company’s global advertising footprint.
Disney started streaming advertising in the United States, allowing the company to learn from its early mistakes.
“They have been talking about the slow rollout we’ve planned — intentionally — we learned a ton in the U.S. It is not day one everybody shows up,” Ferro says, adding that they are focused on “how we help customers come in and how they use the product and you want to manage it, so that you can make sure that you deliver campaigns for clients in a timely process, and in the scope of time that they would like that those campaigns to be delivered.”
Customers Are Choosing Ad-Based Streaming
According to Ferro, more than 50% of new subscribers to Disney+ are choosing the ad tier. Additionally, the engagement on the ad version of the streaming service has increased by 35 percent since March.
Ferro notes, however, that Disney+ has some different programming in different markets “so that they want to make sure that they’re able to deliver it market by market.”.
Based on Disney’s recent price increases, it is clear that they are pushing customers to the ad-based tiers. In August, the company announced it was increasing prices for its ad-free tier. At the same time, they also announced they were expanding the ad-based tier to the global market.
“In the market today on Disney+ we have all of our holiday sponsorships out for sale,” Ferro says. “We are very, very excited about where we are from a product roadmap perspective. I think we’re in a great place.”
Disney Attends CES
Disney is also planning on holding its annual advertising tech and data showcase in person for the first time. The event will take place at the Chelsea Theater at the CES conference in Las Vegas in January.
“In the last I would say five years, [CES has] become really a kicking off point for starting the upfront-season conversation in a much more robust and direct way,” Ferro says. “The great thing about CES also is that you have a lot of international participants as well. CES and Cannes [the Cannes Lions advertising festival] both have a lot of international participants. So it’s places where we actually have had meetings on a global scale across brands and partners, and it just made sense to do it there.”