Warner Bros. Discovery announced new advanced advertising products marketers can buy on its Max streaming service during its upfront presentation Wednesday.
The new capabilities include shoppable ads, advanced contextual targeting and interactive video formats.
The theme of Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront was “Make It Happen Here,” emphasizing the company’s ability to meld its programming and marketing solutions for advertisers.
The company also introduced “One WBD,” a system that lets advertisers take advantage of all of the company’s assets, from streaming and linear networks, to movies and licensing. Putting it all together results in what the company calls The WBD Effect.
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Before the upfront presentation, Jon Steinlauf, chief U.S. advertising sales officer at Warner Bros. Discovery, told B+C that advanced advertising was one of three big growth drivers for the company, along with sports and streaming.
“We’ve really stepped up our effort in advanced advertising,” Steinlauf said.
Warner Bros. Discovery last month launched Olli, a first-party data platform advertisers can use for converged target advertising campaigns. It also launched a product called data-driven video across its linear and streaming networks.
“Advanced advertising starts to make a difference if you have the right data,” Steinlauf said. “Over the last nine months, we have upgraded our data. We now have first-party data on 100 million households and 700 million devices.”
Warner Bros. Discovery can take an advertiser’s strategic target, put it into a clean room, match it with WBD’s data and come out with unique households after de-duplication.
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“We can follow those households wherever they’re watching us, whatever device, whatever platform,” Steinlauf said.
WBD can also maximize reach for the target audience while smoothing the frequency of the campaign, he said.
Warner Bros. Discovery said shoppable content ads enable viewers to find out more about featured products and how to purchase them.
Advanced Contextual Targeting matches an advertiser’s message with the emotional tone of a specific moment in content, finding the ideal moment when an ad will be most relevant within an episode of a show. Brand suitability is also ensured.
Warner Bros. Discovery is offering several flavors of interactive video ads, including Click-to-Contact, enabling viewers to engage with a brand and ask for more information about special offers or sweepstakes via their remote control.
Trivia and Polls is an interactive format featuring questions relevant to the brand. In the future, show IP will be integrated into these formats to intensify the connection between brand and content.
The Viewer’s Choice format enables consumers to select the ad that best matches their interests. The ads are designed to boost engagement and create a tailored ad experience for Max subscribers.
Warner Bros. Discovery previously announced that Brand Block, Sequential Ads and RE/Form ads were available to engage subscribers of Max’s ad-light tier.
Steinlauf said that WBD was also looking to support the non-sports parts of its linear portfolio, many of which historically have been popular with advertisers.
WBD’s streaming ad business is growing faster, but its linear networks generate more revenue. According to the company’s first-quarter earnings report, ad revenues for the traditional networks was down 11% to $1.99 billion, while DTC advertising increased 70% to $175 million.
Steinlauf headed sales for HGTV and Food Network at Scripps Networks Interactive before it was acquired by Discovery, and has overseen all ad sales since Discovery acquired WarnerMedia to become WBD.
HGTV and Food Network “have always been Madison Avenue darlings,” he said.
“I can tell you at the end of every single upfront negotiation for three companies over 20 years, I get asked, ‘Do I really have to pay that much for HGTV and Food?‘ and the answer is, ‘The demand is there,’ ” he said.
