Will Disney’s New AdTech Product Change the Scene?

Will Disney’s New AdTech Product Change the Scene?

In our first edition of beehiiv, you’ll read about that, plus:

• The impact of Mastercard’s subscription management app,

• Disney’s DRAX Unveiled,

• Product updates from Substack, beehiiv, and WordPress,

• the evolving role of AI in media,

• and why I think the interactive trailer for Medal of Honor 3 is significant.

💰 Revenue & AdTech

Mastercard has released a subscription management app for consumers. While this is still some time in the future (it has to be adopted by your bank first), publishers may have reason for concern, or maybe not? This is what the Toolkits newsletter has investigated this week. According to one of their earlier survey results, consumers have said they’d be more likely to pay for a subscription if it was easier to unsubscribe from. Whether that will save some of the damage of off-platform subscription management (corporate jargon for unsubscribing). When a user tries to unsubscribe, it’s normal to offer them a discount or a promotion. Mastercard’s Smart Subscription product will take that option (and a percentage of revenue) away.

Meanwhile, Disney has come out with its new AdTech product, DRAX, which is probably an acronym and sounds like a detergent. DRAX is a programmatic ad server for Disney assets that lets advertisers buy ads on assets like Hulu and Disney+ using standard protocols like the Trade Desk. Disney's using new tech like Google's PAIR and The Trade Desk's UID 2 to stay ahead of the cookie deprecation’s effects on advertising. Google's PAIR is a new protocol that lets Google match ads to viewers without needing cookies, which is one possible way the future of advertising may go.

🆕 Product Updates

• Substack now offers a newsletter dedicated to keeping users in the loop on platform updates and new features. Which makes sense, considering how frequently the updates have been recently.

• beehiiv has added subscriber tags to help publishers better organize and target their newsletters. Among its other new features is one that lets you easily add a reading time for each edition of your newsletter as part of the byline.

• WordPress is gearing up to launch its new version 6.5 with the publication of its 3rd Release Candidate. At Refact, we’re getting ready for it by updating the free plugins we have created for the new version.  

🤖 Newsroom AI that Works 

This week, Nieman labs published an incredible article on the potential of AI in the newsroom. Zach Seward from The New York Times shared insights on AI's successful roles in journalism, highlighting how it's transforming newsrooms. By sifting through vast amounts of data, AI helped Quartz uncover hidden financial stories and The Wall Street Journal identify public health hazards from lead cabling using image recognition. The Marshall Project utilized AI to summarize complex prison policy documents, making them more understandable for the public.

👀 What Caught My Eye This Week

The interactive website-slash-trailer meta has put together for Metal of Honor: Above and Beyond is a good example of how to promote VR over 2d. Until VR becomes the norm, that’s what we will have to create to promote any VR products.