Ten spots left to join us in NYC on July 15
How Disney is nearing its goal to automate 75% of ad sales by 2027

This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify
The Walt Disney Company plans to automate 75% of its advertising business by 2027. And the company took a further step toward that end in this year’s annual TV and streaming advertising upfront market.
“Of the streaming dollars that came in, of those billions of dollars, more than half of them are transacted programmatically,” Disney’s svp of addressable sales Jamie Power said on stage during the Digiday Publishing Summit in a session that served as a live recording for the Digiday Podcast.
A catalyst to the growth of Disney’s automation efforts this year was the parity that the company has created in making the breadth of its streaming inventory available for purchase programmatically. That includes, more recently, its interactive ad formats.
“Once we finally were able to enable them, within six weeks the spend was eight times the spend than the year before,” Power said.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.
The beauty of back-end infrastructure
One of the beauties of having our own tech stack is we actually this year will have the ability to take an ad, publish once and distribute to all of our endpoints.
Audience reach across Disney’s streaming portfolio
If you extended your campaign to Hulu on Disney+, it expanded the reach of the campaign 40%, and the duplication between people watching the Disney+ content was 5%. So it just shows that people are going to different apps and different environments for different reasons.
Programmatic guaranteed deals vs. biddable buying
Last year or the year before last, we were 30% biddable and 70% PG. This year it flipped. The biggest learning there was the [account executives] and the sales team have to treat it more like a campaign. Biddable, it’s not ‘set it and forget it.’ You’re not setting up the deal ID and walking away from it. You still have to have the conversation with the client of how much money do they want to run through this, what is the audience, so you can understand how much inventory is against it.
Big bucks in biddable
We’re seeing some of the biggest advertisers in the world activating 100% biddable now with us. Some of them are spending almost $100 million a year in biddable environments.
More in Future of TV

Future of TV Briefing: YouTube gives a peek at how its recommendation algorithms work
This week’s Future of TV Briefing recaps a VidCon session during which YouTube executives and creators unpacked the video platform’s recommendation engine.

How TikTok’s ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ landed on Hulu, with Select Management Group’s Danielle Pistotnik
The talent manager and executive producer of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” joined the Digiday Podcast to break down the process of the reality show finding a home on Hulu.

Future of TV Briefing: Upfront ad buyers debate the value of out-of-home viewership
This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the question of how TV and streaming audiences watching in a bar or other public place should be counted — and, more importantly, charged for — compared to people watching at home.