Disney Hoping AI Can Help Match Commercials With Content

ODSC - Open Data Science
2 min readFeb 22, 2024

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It’s being reported that Disney is in the beta testing phase of a new AI tool called Magic Words. This tool hopes to help match commercials with appropriate scenes within movies and TV shows. On the 9th, Reuters reported that the tool uses machine learning to tag scenes from the company’s vast media library.

The way it works is by analyzing and tagging scenes, the Magic Words AI helps to identify content, brands, images, and even the mood within each scene being played. This information in turn is used as metadata that brands can use to personalize messaging to target audiences.

For media buyers, it would be as if Meta’s Business Ad suite’s targeting had up-to-the-minute real-time data to work with. This new tool is aimed at its Disney + streaming service and Hulu, which the company owns a sizable share of. The goal of which would be to help connect with the emotions of consumers based on what they’re watching.

In a way, moving media buying away from broad demographic targeting to a more specific audience model. According to the same report, Disney has partnered with six global advertising companies in this beta to test the new tool.

If this does indeed work as well as the company hopes, it could potentially reshape how ads are created in the digital space. The investment for this new tool comes at a time when the company is facing financial pressures on multiple fronts.

Most notable for this case, is a drop in advertising revenue by 3%. During this same time, the company has gone all in with its ad-supported version of Disney+ which has attached more than 1,000 advertisers in the first quarter of 2024.

This is a great number for the company to work with as it beta tests the AI tool in hopes of driving significant ad spend on the platform. If proven successful, it’s easy to believe that other streaming competitors will seek to create similar AI-powered advertising tools.

Netflix is growing its ad-supported base and Amazon Prime has already added an ad-supported tier to its platform. In a bid to chase advertising dollars, AI-powered tools such as Magic Words could be the next big thing.

Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com

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