Product Updates

3 Tips for Reaching Your Ideal Audience with Disney Campaign Manager

Streaming is the new primetime. A platform that attracts the audiences advertisers are looking for: engaged, young, and diverse – at scale. At Hulu, we know how important it is to reach the right consumers at the right time, and streaming delivers on that promise.

Applying targeting parameters to your campaign can help you reach and connect with an audience that’s relevant to your business, meet your KPIs, and ultimately achieve your desired outcomes. By choosing parameters effectively, you can reduce ad waste so that your ad dollars are going to good use. Depending on the type of advertiser, Disney Campaign Manager (formerly Hulu Ad Manager) gives you a wide variety of options, including demographics, location, audience interest, genre, and more – all in a privacy-focused way. With so many options available, though, how do you choose? To maximize scale, it is recommended to follow essential best practices for a successful data-enabled campaign.

Here are three things to keep in mind when thinking about setting up your campaign:

Less Can Be More

An important consideration for marketers is that layering on too many parameters for one campaign can limit the audience pool, impact scale, and therefore may prevent your ads from reaching potential customers. 

For example, if you already have a very specific audience in mind in terms of demographics, location, and interest, then layering on an additional parameter like show genre might unnecessarily limit your reach. Unless your brand is associated with a specific genre, such as Health and Wellness, you might want to cast a wider net. (Remember: You’ll be able to reach your audience while they’re watching Hulu – regardless of the show or genre!) Another option is to exclude genres that don’t align with your campaign; if your product or service skews towards a mature audience, you might consider excluding the “Family” genre.

A/B Test Your Selections

If you’re unsure about how to reach your audience on Disney Campaign Manager, you can split your budget between two campaigns and try an A/B test. Simply set up two separate campaigns with the same video ad and budget but slightly alter your targeting parameters. Keep in mind that you should only change a few criteria at a time to make it easier to identify which part of your A/B test impacted performance. 

For example, if you want to test whether your ad resonates more with a particular age group, then you should leave other parameters the same for both campaigns and only test different age ranges. 

Run one campaign, then the next. Did you see an increase in site visits, purchases, or social media follows during one particular campaign? You can also use vanity URLs or customized promo codes to test performance. Once you test a couple of times, you should get a good understanding of how to reach the audiences most relevant to your business using Disney Campaign Manager.

Tailor Your Messages to Specific Audiences

If you know your audience well, you can tailor ads to be more relevant for each audience segment, which can increase the likelihood of viewers taking action. Don’t worry – this doesn’t mean that you need to create hundreds of creative versions for every possible audience. 

Take Harney & Sons, for example. The New York-based tea purveyor ran three campaigns on Disney Campaign Manager during the holiday season: the first campaign featured a holiday-themed ad and was implemented to reach a general audience; the second campaign featured a tried-and-true brand awareness ad implemented to reach a specific tea-sipping audience; and the third campaign featured a funnier ad implemented to reach to viewers in their late twenties and thirties. This strategy worked well for Harney & Sons; they saw more site traffic during the holidays than ever before because they factored segmentation into their strategy.

Hopefully these tips will be helpful as you plan your next campaign, though it’s important to note that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. If you’re a Disney Campaign Manager (formerly Hulu Ad Manager) customer, you can check out our Right On Target video to dive even deeper into campaign setup. If you’re not yet a Disney Campaign Manager customer, sign up here to get started with streaming and see your ad on a platform with some of TV’s biggest shows!