The days of waiting until a campaign ends to find out whether it worked may soon be over.
Warner Bros. Discovery has unveiled a real-time measurement and attribution dashboard that lets marketers monitor and optimize campaigns while they’re still running – a shift from the traditional post-campaign reporting model that has long frustrated brands seeking agility.
“For the first time, we are giving clients the capability of looking at their campaigns while they’re running in flight and optimizing them with our third-party partners,” said Ed Romaine, group svp and head of revenue marketing at Warner Bros. Discovery, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
From passive viewing to active participation
The dashboard was among several announcements WBD made during the upfronts, including a cross-platform advertising suite called “Unbreakable” designed to engage fans across linear television, digital, and social platforms simultaneously.
The concept emerged from data showing that brands running messages across both TNT Sports linear broadcasts and Bleacher Report’s digital and social platforms saw an average 70% brand lift. “The idea with Unbreakable is that a brand can show up in the right way for a fan wherever they happen to be consuming our content,” Romaine said.
The framework operates around four pillars:
- Pulse captures real-time fan energy through features like live polls appearing simultaneously on linear broadcasts and Bleacher Report.
- Engage encourages debate among fans.
- Reward offers exclusive access to experiences.
- Highlight brings fans to the forefront during live game action.
“All of these things are able to be sponsored and brought to you by a brand,” Romaine said. “But at the core is the viewer and the actual fan experience.”
Interactive formats show early promise
WBD’s push into interactive advertising formats is already yielding measurable results. The company’s “Moments” product, which places brands within specific scenes across its content library, has generated a 19% increase in viewer engagement on average.
Shoppable formats are proving particularly effective, with the company reporting a 13% jump in purchase intent. The newly introduced shoppable pause ad builds on an existing product that had already achieved a 15% increase in mobile scans and an average return on ad spend of 2.5.
“The reason that we decided to include the pause feature as part of the shoppable product is that we wanted a captive audience,” Romaine said. “The pause enables us to increase that efficacy even further by letting people actually look at the product that’s in front of them and decide if they want to purchase it or not.”
AI-powered creative optimization on the horizon
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how WBD approaches ad creative. Dynamic creative capabilities now allow the company to adjust what an ad looks and feels like in real-time, making messages more contextually relevant to the content surrounding them.
The company is developing what it calls “agentic experiences” that will let brands specify their desired outcomes and have the system automatically optimize creative placement. “When the viewer is looking at a specific scene and there’s the perfect intent to show that brand in the most suitable surrounding, that’s how the creative will inform itself,” Romaine said.
The Unbreakable suite is also set to expand beyond sports in the coming months. Romaine pointed to home competition programming as a natural extension, where similar interactive experiences could populate across WBD’s home and design websites, social platforms, and television episodes. “We want to make the experience for our brand partners as turnkey as possible,” he said, “which is why we introduced those products at the upfront.”
