How Disney is encouraging sports advertisers to embrace data and tech

Data, tech, and sports make for great teammates. Teams use databases for recruiting and on-field management. At some stadiums, fans can pay for their hot dogs and beers with their palms. And don’t get us started on the die-hard fantasy football managers.

In sports marketing, though, it’s a bit of a different story. It’s not that sports marketers don’t have access to an abundance of fan data—it’s just that they perhaps haven’t been incentivized to take full advantage of it, given that sports is seen largely as a vehicle for brands to achieve wide reach, SVP of Disney Advertising Sales Wendell Scott said.

“I don’t think we’re behind on the data; I think we’re behind on utilizing the data to create insights,” Scott told Marketing Brew at CES.

As one of the biggest media companies in the country, Disney has built up many data and ad tech tools for advertisers to use, including audience graphs, clean rooms, and programmatic buying for live sports. As marketers look for more metrics to evaluate campaign effectiveness, Scott said his team is working to encourage them to lean in, including at CES, during the company’s annual Global Tech and Data Showcase.

First-party fans: Disney has an expansive digital footprint, with 20 million people engaging with ESPN’s digital content alone during any given month, according to Scott. Those people can personalize their experiences, like indicating their favorite teams, he said, and Disney has a good sense of what content they consume on its platforms—from news, to analysis, to fantasy sports, to the specific leagues, conferences, and teams they follow. Disney also has an audience graph, which combines that information on audience content preferences with other first-party data, like purchasing behavior, Scott said.

“You put that together, then that allows for specific targeting, and actually drives more performance,” he said. And even when it comes to brand awareness campaigns, CMOs are increasingly looking at lower-funnel performance metrics to demonstrate that their dollars are being well spent, Scott said.

Clean sweep: When brands have first-party data of their own—plus second- or third-party data they may want to incorporate in campaigns—Disney can combine it with its own data in more than 75 active clean rooms, thanks to partnerships with “every major holding company,” Scott said, plus Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud as of this year.

Those combined data sets can be used to create and target audience segments, he said, which can serve to further help sports marketers create campaigns that can drive sales as opposed to building brand awareness and loyalty alone. Disney’s clean rooms are reportedly becoming quite popular, but Scott said there’s still room to grow.

“We would love more and more marketers to leverage their first-party data with our first-party data,” he said. “The clean room is the most opportunistic way to actually do that.”

Pro-game-matic: Sports advertisers tend to use programmatic marketplaces to target audiences “no matter where they’re consuming the content,” Scott told us. But that mindset could mean they’re missing out on opportunities to expand their reach, he said, particularly when it comes to live sports.

“The marketplace hasn’t thought about automation and programmatic from a content standpoint,” Scott said. “They’re thinking about it from the audience down.”

During football season, for instance, he said ESPN sees big spikes in live sports streaming viewership from Thursday through Monday. When there’s a larger audience than expected—or more content, like when a live game goes into overtime—that means more space for advertisers, but only if there’s the ability to act right away.

“What we’re trying to do is work with advertisers to get them to understand that you should open up your aperture to make sure that you’re taking advantage of those spikes,” Scott said. “How do you take advantage of that in real time? Through automation, and through programmatic, and through biddable marketplaces. We’re trying to open up as many deal IDs and opportunities around sports as possible.”