The mouse house is big – but few advertisers would want to reach the entirety of Disney’s audience footprint.

That’s why Lisa Valentino is offering technology to support refined audience targeting capability.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Valentino, executive Vice President, Client Solutions & Addressable Enablement, Disney Advertising Sales, explains how how developments announced at last week’s first-ever Disney Platform Tech Showcase, as well as others, can help achieve that aim.

Selling the graph

The corporation is wrapping together all its first-party audience targeting capabilities from the Disney Audience Graph in something called Disney Select, the mechanism to make those criteria buyable.

According to the announcement: “With Disney Select, marketers can select desired audiences from Disney’s extensive library of first-party segments that are designed to meet client needs like buyer behavior, household characteristics and psychographics.”

Disney has spent the last three years building an audience graph, now including Hulu data, with over 1,000 audience identity segments, buyable in an automated fashion.

Segmenting scale

As the Disney empire expands, Valentino acknowledges that advertisers don’t necessarily want to reach all parts of the map.

“Reach is important in selling products and services, which is what our clients want to do every day,” she says. “But reach is different today.

“At Hulu, we see 92 million connected viewers every month on the ad-supported side.

It’s less about ‘How do I engage the 92 million?’ It’s ‘How do I understand those audience sets? What types of segmentation can I take advantage of on a platform like Hulu?'”

Incubating new formats

Over the last couple of years, Hulu has innovated with ad formats that deliver whilst shows are paused, whilst viewers are binge-watching, interactive ads, choice-based ads and more.

One of the latest formats is GatewayGo, allowing viewers to take direct action with a brand service on a second screen.

Valentino says: “We think about Hulu almost as an incubator for new ad products.”

Hulu’s Pause Ads Lift Brands 68%: Helfand

Toward the future

Hulu leadership is increasingly being folded into that of Disney+ in an effort to address international markets, where Hulu has mostly struggled to gain traction.

But it is as “Star” that Disney is bringing a Hulu-like show bundle to international audiences.

As viewing grows and targeting gets more capable, Valentino wants to be able to show ad buyers proof of effectiveness.

She is delivering planning and measurement through partnerships like with Samba TV partnership, making data available in Nielsen Media Impact and Innovid, plus a Hulu attribution tool that D2C clients use to connect their own CRM to Hulu.

You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews