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Disney Advertising struck a deal with Walmart Connect that allows advertisers to target Disney’s streaming portfolio, including Disney+ and Hulu, using Walmart’s shopper data, the companies announced today.
In addition, Disney is joining Walmart’s Partner Lab, a group of connected TV and social platforms that the retailer works with to test new ad formats and measurement. With the news, Disney joins Roku, NBCUniversal, TalkShopLive and TikTok, which are all part of the retail giant’s Partner Lab initiative, established in 2022.
“At the highest level, Disney is on a journey to enable the datasets that work for clients,” Jamie Power, senior vice president of addressable sales at Disney, told ADWEEK. “It could be retail media data. It could be identity framework for one of our DSP (demand-side platform) partners. For us, we just want to make sure we’re creating an open ecosystem so they can transact on the data that works for them.”
Coming ahead of the TV upfront, these agreements follow a flurry of increased collaboration between retailers and CTV platforms and manufacturers amid the rise of retail media, which offers a wealth of first-party data from loyalty programs and purchases in the face of Google’s impending third-party cookie deprecation.
Disney announced a similar partnership with Kroger Precision Marketing last year. Meanwhile, Walmart agreed to acquire smart TV maker Vizio in a deal expected to close early next year, which will further bolster the company’s data.
The retail-CTV sweet spot
What sets Walmart Connect and Disney Advertising’s new deal apart, Power explained, is Disney’s Audience Graph. The company describes it as a “Rosetta Stone” for translating insights across ad-supported audience touch points, including digital, social and streaming, as well as household-level data.