Disney's Trade Desk Partnership Leads Advertisers Into a Post-Cookie World

Cookies aren't in the diet for advertisers anymore, and Disney's new partnership with The Trade Desk is looking to stop any lingering cravings. Disney Advertising is teaming with the global ad-tech company The Trade Desk in an effort to power greater audience activation at scale programmatically. The integration will power interoperability between Disney's Audience Graph and The Trade Desk through the open-source framework Unified ID 2.0, all while using Disney’s secure clean-room technology. "The data and identity landscape continues to evolve and requires ongoing innovation, and that's exactly what we've done here," Tim Sims, chief revenue officer, The Trade Desk, told Adweek. "When you create interoperability between Unified ID 2.0 and Disney's Audience Graph, one of the amazing outcomes of that is that advertisers are going to be able to activate their first-party data at scale against the world's most premium content across Disney's portfolio." The companies have been working on the deal for the last year, and Lisa Valentino, evp of client solutions and addressable enablement at Disney Advertising, told Adweek they finally inked things behind closed doors at last month's Cannes Lions. "There are lots of ways to connect datasets in this market, but what took us a year and the time was really building the bridge through our clean-room solution to ensure that this was built with the utmost privacy protection. What it delivers is greater access to Disney's inventory through The Trade Desk. What it allows is the use of our first-party data through that mechanism, through that relationship, in a way that we've never offered before," Valentino said. Because of the deal, buyers will be able to discover more addressable, biddable inventory across the Disney ecosystem, all validated by Disney’s proprietary Audience Graph. The Audience Graph, which Valentino tells us consists of 100 million household IDs, 160 million connected TV IDs and 190 million device IDs and updates in real-time, is the foundation of the company's data capabilities, providing more than 2,000 segments that clients can activate against. Disney’s agreement with the ad-tech company powers better audience activation and measurement and acts as an answer for the industry disruption brought on by the deprecation of third-party cookies. As opposed to the data risk through cookies, privacy was of the utmost importance in getting the partnership going. According to Valentino, Disney's clean-room technology was "the anchor" for the deal. "It's interesting. We announced our clean-room strategy at our data and tech showcase in February, and today you see a pretty big acceleration towards clean rooms," Valentino said. "I think you're seeing virtually every category participate. We have over 40 activations live right now with different clients and agencies. And I think it's because, in a world where privacy and data compliance is at the forefront, this allows for these types of relationships to exist." An automated future The company also leaned into automated ad-buying at Disney's tech and data showcase, aiming to automate 50% of its business in the next three years. Jeremy Helfand, svp and head of advertising platforms for Disney media and entertainment distribution, told Adweek the deal with The Trade Desk is a step towards that future. "This validates our focus on making Disney not only the place that advertisers come to be adjacent to the world's best storytelling content but also the place that they come to get the very best audience-based data and technology capabilities when trying to reach their audiences," Helfand said. Though Disney hasn't revealed many details about Disney+'s advertising strategy, outside of four-minute ad-loads and restrictions around kid-centric programming, the streamer's upcoming lower-cost, ad-supported tier may also benefit from the deal. "The interoperability and ability to deliver first-party audience targeting programmatically as part of the unified advertising platform—we expect that those capabilities will be universal across all of our addressable endpoints," Helfand said. "In terms of what capabilities will be available at Disney+ as advertising roles out there, we have not announced what will be there upon launch yet. But ultimately, we expect that this will be in place across any addressable endpoint for Walt Disney Company." Meanwhile, Disney is one of the last remaining upfront week presenters that hasn't yet finished its upfront negotiations. Most of its peers—including NBCUniversal, TelevisaUnivision, Fox, Paramount and The CW—concluded their respective talks in mid-to-late-June. Rita Ferro on Disney+ Ads and How Jimmy Kimmel Made the Upfront Despite Getting Covid