Disney beefs up addressable ad unit with Cadent’s Jamie Power

Disney is building out its addressable advertising unit in an effort to unify its ad offering across its media portfolio. 

The media giant has hired Cadent’s Jamie Power as SVP of addressable sales, a new role responsible for growing Disney’s addressable business across programmatic, self-serve, performance marketing and streaming.

Power will assume the role at the end of May and will lead a team of more than 200, Disney said.

She joins from a five-year stint at addressable TV ad platform Cadent, most recently as chief data officer and head of platform, where she was responsible for overseeing the company’s buy-and sell-side businesses.

Previously, Power co-founded addressable video solution One2one Media and was a founding member and managing partner at Modi Media, GroupM’s advanced television group.

Disney is also investing in its insights and measurement capabilities with internal promotions. Dana McGraw has been elevated to SVP of audience modeling and data science, adding responsibility over advertiser performance, insights and attribution to her current role. McGraw’s team has led the development of Disney’s data products and insights, including its clean room technology and proprietary audience graph. 

Additionally, Danielle Brown, SVP of data enablement and category strategy, will add oversight over measurement and analytics. 

The media company is hiring a VP of measurement who will report to Brown and play a key role in helping Disney build out its cross-platform measurement strategy. Disney currently works with over 100 measurement vendors — all of whom are vying to become TV’s new currency.

Power, McGraw and Brown all report to Lisa Valentino, Disney Advertising’s EVP of client solutions and addressable enablement.

The new roles are part of Disney’s plans to make its ad business fully automated and addressable. At last year’s upfront, the media giant said 40% of total ad deals struck were addressable.

Disney will add Disney Plus to its ad portfolio later this year as it works on plans to roll out an ad-supported tier for the subscription streaming service. It was revealed last week that Disney is planning a light ad load for Disney Plus, with ad breaks limited to four minutes on movies or shows that last an hour or less, according to reports from Variety and The Wall Street Journal.