Interview with Disney's Larry Shapiro Page 3

FierceMobileContent: Is it becoming easier to get content distributed across all carriers? I see you have a WAP-content deal for High School Musical 2 across several operators.

Shapiro: With the sites that get the major traffic--Disney, ESPN and ABC--there is interest across the board. But it still is a matter of negotiating deals for placement. It’s still very early days in the advertising front. That’s a pretty complicated area.

FierceMobileContent: But you need to get your content across multiple carriers to get the visibility and the “eyeballs” that you need to attract the big advertisers, right?

Shapiro: Yes, but the advertising ecosystem is still uncertain. There are a host of things the carriers are interested in that may differ from carrier to carrier. There are different advertising standards, different advertising sizes, different porting requirements. This makes it difficult to scale a national rollout of significance. You can do it without looking for placement by the carriers by just launching WAP sites and hoping people will come. But our mindset is to work with the carriers to get the placement and mutually reinforce promotions when we launch content.

 

On the ad-supported side, it’s still early. I think it’s going to require leadership from the Mobile Marketing Association and the media buying agencies to break through. Right now it’s too difficult to manage advertising campaigns, insertions and reporting on a carrier-by-carrier basis.

FierceMobileContent: I don’t hear about anyone being wildly successful in mobile advertising. But I do hear about a lot of different models.

Shapiro: There is an appetite for free content that is ad-supported. I think it behooves everyone in the industry to try it and try different things to build this business. As we talk about integration with online as being a cornerstone to our business, ad sales is an important part of that. We have multiple ad sales teams across Disney, ESPN and ABC and the notion of selling to the mobile platform is very appealing. It makes a lot of sense to us to sell a campaign across all platforms. But to do that you have to have the ability to promise the right kind of delivery across the right audience and you have to have the right reporting back that is consistent and unified.

We are active with the MMA to help define standards and consistency. We have been on the Internet for a long time. My boss, Steve Wadsworth, was the president of the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and for the past nine years we have seen a constant upgrading of the advertising standards. I think there is a benchmark out there for a new industry, started from scratch and fostered by ad revenue. I hope we can learn some lessons from that.

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