Disney exec tempers expectations for ESPN direct-to-consumer ad sales

On Tuesday, ESPN will debut its new direct-to-consumer streaming service during Disney’s Upfront.

The platform, aptly dubbed ESPN, will offer consumers the company’s flagship linear networks as part of a monthly subscription. Its launch, set for sometime before football season, will be highly anticipated among industry observers eager to know if the product will succeed.

Disney executives, however, are tempering expectations. Even though this is the first time the ESPN family of networks will be available on a streaming service, free of any pay-TV bundle, the new product is still new. As such, it’s unlikely ESPN will immediately be one of the biggest players in streaming. Just like other streaming platforms, it’ll take time to grow.

That’s why Disney won’t get out over its skis when selling advertising for the forthcoming streamer.

Speaking with Mollie Cahillane of Sports Business Journal, Disney’s President of Global Advertising, Rita Ferro, illuminated some of the challenges the company will face selling ad inventory on a brand new platform.

“In terms of the long-term growth of the business, it still has to be adopted, it still has to be used,” Ferro told SBJ. “We still have to have numbers behind it. We’re just launching it in the fall. It’ll take a little time, as everything does, to get adopted and get used.”

That lack of data will certainly be a hurdle for ad buyers, who are used to having treasure troves of data presented to them before making purchases. Of course, that isn’t possible on a streaming service that has yet to launch.

Luckily, ESPN’s new streamer won’t be a standalone product. It’ll be integrated into the rest of Disney’s offerings, including Disney+, which already has a robust subscriber base. The key is converting viewers who might not immediately gravitate towards sports to sample some of the ESPN content.

“We want to make sure that we’re serving up certain content that it maybe isn’t as significant in terms of who the core consumer is on the ESPN ‘Flagship’ app, making it discoverable, and having an expanded audience watching that content within a Disney+ environment, very similar to what we did with NHL on Hulu,” Ferro said of the company’s strategy.

ESPN has the distinct advantage of living within the Disney ecosystem, a luxury that other sports networks do not enjoy.

Still, it will take until this time next year for the company to truly realize what it can achieve from an advertising standpoint with its new direct-to-consumer product.