How The Trade Desk proved the incremental brand impact of omnichannel for Disney+

The Trade Desk enables advertisers to activate audiences across an increasingly connected media landscape, from CTV and BVOD to audio, online video, DOOH and display.

These channels create different moments of attention, but increasingly form part of a single campaign strategy. Measurement has not always kept pace.

Marketers may know whether an individual channel drove brand lift. What is harder to understand is the incremental impact created when channels are experienced together.

For The Trade Desk, that raised a key question: If omnichannel campaigns are activated as one connected strategy, how can their brand impact be measured in the same way?

A campaign with Disney+ France was the perfect opportunity to answer that question.

Since launching in France in 2020, Disney+ has competed for attention in a crowded streaming market, supported by a premium content portfolio spanning Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and National Geographic to attract, engage, and retain subscribers.

Heading into the 2025 holiday season, the most competitive window of the year for viewer attention and subscription acquisition, Disney+ activated a national awareness campaign through The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform across four channels: CTV, BVOD, audio, and open online video.

The most important question was not about delivery.

When CTV, BVOD, audio and OLV run simultaneously, does combined exposure move people further than the strongest channel alone?

Standard brand lift reporting can rank individual channels. It cannot isolate synergy: the incremental impact created when channels work together.

In a pre-launch partnership, The Trade Desk and Happydemics launched an omnichannel Brand Lift study, designed both to evaluate the Disney+ campaign and help shape Happydemics’ future omnichannel measurement capability.

The result was a framework combining cross-channel activation, unified audience measurement and outcome-based reporting.

Rather than four siloed studies, a single design measured audiences across all four channels simultaneously. Ad recalling groups included both individual channels and combinations such as CTV alone, CTV + audio and CTV + audio + OLV.

Using a single cross-channel survey, IP-validated ad recallers were compared with a statistically matched group of non-recallers. The reported lift captured the incremental brand impact of each channel combination, while synergy was measured against the best-performing lower-level combination within the campaign.

The campaign delivered nearly 17 million impressions, reaching 7.5 million unique people and 6.8 million households across France.

The study measured three key outcomes: brand image, brand preference and consideration.

In parallel, The Trade Desk’s omnichannel reporting mapped reach, household overlap and cross-channel distribution.

The optimal combination depended on the outcome Disney+ wanted to influence. CTV + audio + OLV performed most strongly for brand image and preference, while CTV + BVOD + OLV delivered the strongest consideration result.

Without a methodology designed to compare channel combinations across multiple brand outcomes, that distinction would remain invisible and unactionable.

The findings help inform future campaign planning and demonstrate the value of measuring omnichannel activity as a connected whole rather than as a series of isolated channels.

More broadly, the study represents an important step towards a more unified approach to omnichannel measurement, one that can better capture cross-channel exposure, synergy and brand impact.

The long-term ambition is to give advertisers a clearer understanding of how different combinations of touchpoints drive brand growth, and how those insights can inform future media strategy.