Beyond the 30-Second Spot: Disney’s Andrew Messina on Creating Unforgettable Brand Moments

[00:00:01] When you talk about having ESPN, ABC, Hulu's 15 years old, ABC's 73 years old, then you have Freeform, FX, Nat Geo, and everything in between, we feel like a lot of our partners right now, they are looking for fewer, bigger, better partnerships. So if you're going to look for fewer, bigger, better, really Disney Advertising Sales is the place you're going to go. To thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, brands must move in an ever-increasing pace.

[00:00:30] I'm Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy. Join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry, why it matters now, and how you can keep up. Welcome to The Speed of Culture.

[00:00:47] We're here live in Las Vegas at CES and today we are thrilled to welcome Andrew Messina, the SVP of Sales of Disney Advertising. With years of experience driving innovation at one of the world's most iconic companies, Andrew has been instrumental in reshaping how brands connect with audiences through storytelling, data, and live events. Andrew, so great to see you. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. So as somebody who sits on top of the advertising organization at Disney, you must have so many different things that you have to balance just because the company has so many assets.

[00:01:15] And I'm sure that you guys work with the biggest advertisers and want to leverage those assets to drive their brand. Yeah. What are the top priorities for you heading into 2025 in terms of the assets that are most in demand by your advertising community? I mean, for us primarily, we have a lot of assets, like you said, but it's really streaming and sports. Live sports is huge for us. We were talking earlier, you talk about the sports.

[00:01:38] We have the Orange Bowl tonight in Miami. Tomorrow night, we have the Cotton Bowl. Monday, we have the wild card game in the NFL. So we have a ton of live sports that we can look at. And then coming up in March, we have the Oscars. But we also have a ton when it comes to streaming. When you look at Hulu, Disney Plus, there's a lot of hype behind that. We continue to invest in the content there. So we have a lot to offer our clients.

[00:02:01] So sports and streaming kind of offer two different approaches for advertisers because, of course, sports is unlike almost anything else on television because it's live. It's one of the last bastions of live television, along with live award shows, as you mentioned. And obviously, the benefit of brands advertising during live sporting events is they really can tap into the second screen experience and community. And it's really of the moment where obviously streaming is time shifted.

[00:02:27] When you talk to brands about those two archetypes of assets, how do you position it to them differently based upon how they're each unique? Well, I mean, first of all, live sports, let's just take Monday Night Football, for example. We've had a phenomenal season. We just signed another deal with them. We have a Super Bowl coming up in 2027 in L.A. It's the first Super Bowl we're going to have on ABC in 20 years. But we're innovative on Monday. It's not just like we used to have ABC Monday Night Football. We have the Manning Kiss on Monday Night Football. I love that. It's so cool.

[00:02:57] And, you know, he brings in Bill Belichick and different talent. So it's not just a regular Monday Night Football telecast with Joe Buck and Troy Eggman. We have to make sure that we're doing different things to really appeal to different audiences and younger audiences. So that's the linear part of it. On the streaming side, you can also watch, we have as a tile on Disney Plus, we announced on December 4th that ESPN is on there. So it's not just the game. It's the game around the game.

[00:03:25] So you can constantly get highlights. And speaking of socially, which is a big buzzword, socially, you can see there's a lot of social buzz around Monday Night Football, not just during the game, before, after. Of course. Yeah. I mean, the NFL has continued to just maintain its role as like the driver of culture and live viewing in America amongst both males and female viewers. A lot of people don't realize how big the NFL is at aggregating female eyeballs as well. Correct. Yeah.

[00:03:52] Well, I mean, you bring that up. And of course, you can't bring up the NFL and females without the Taylor Swift effect. I mean, I have four kids, three of them are daughters. And my 16 year old specifically watches. They're now watching a lot. They like football. I'm a Giants fan. So we're not that happy this year. But Taylor Swift has really made a difference on the female base. We had the chief marketing officer of the Kansas City Chiefs on the podcast a couple months ago, and she was talking about how you balance that.

[00:04:20] Because obviously, the Kansas City Chiefs are a professional football team and there's a lot of distraction. But at the same time, it's bringing so many new people into the fold. It's broadening the horizon of the NFL. And I think it's a great thing. It reminds me of Tim Tebow when he came in the NFL and he was a devout Christian. He brought a whole new community in. And it's great when you can expand an audience through different passion points. I mean, I think the best thing for the NFL and college football for us is the NFL and live sports, specifically those to bring in huge, huge audiences.

[00:04:49] But then when you marry that with streaming, you can actually target it. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. It's more targeted. Yeah. And that's changed because obviously advertising on television used to be cookie cutter, 18 to 49 demographics. And now we're in a world of addressability. So what is Disney's offering when it comes to addressability, leveraging first party data to be super targeted and ultimately drive better performance in ROI from advertising over streaming? Right. So right now we feel like we're best in class. We just had our tech and data showcase.

[00:05:17] We're continually innovating. When you look at the audience segments, we have over 1,800 audience segments that we can deliver. So if you need to deliver a specific person, an auto intender, whose lease is just coming up, we can deliver that person through experience and data. So there's just a lot of different ways that we can reach the consumer for an auto or any category for that matter. But the most important thing for us is there's the upper funnel, which is obviously linear. And then there's a lower funnel, which is the targeting that you were talking about.

[00:05:46] It's a good combination that you need. You can't just have one or the other because sometimes when you're looking at addressable only, you're targeting the same person all the time. You need to make sure that you're targeting different people as well. Absolutely. And speaking of targeting different people, and you briefly mentioned this earlier, but people are consuming sports. They're consuming entertainment differently, especially Gen Z. They're on their phone. They're consuming sports through highlights and quick form snackable content, etc.

[00:06:10] How are you leveraging your social media ecosystem to gain additional reach for advertisers? Well, most of our sports, they all have their own social handles. But we talked about women before, but specifically women's sports, Disney advertising sales and ESPN were the leader in delivering women's sports. And you couldn't last year look at any sports without talking about Caitlin Clark and what she did in Iowa. I went to the final game with LSU. She was phenomenal. Then she goes into the WNBA.

[00:06:41] She has really taken the WNBA by storm. WNBA is by no means new, but she's really taking it to another level. I went to a game here for a conference in the middle of July in Las Vegas for the Aces, and they have a 14,000 seat arena. It was completely full and very entertaining. And it's just not WNBA, by the way. Now we have all ACC, SEC, college sports. So volleyball has taken off. Lacrosse has taken off.

[00:07:07] So it gives advertisers and our consumers an opportunity to reach some of those smaller people that they may not have reached. Because there's people that want to reach volleyball players or people that are watching volleyball or people who are watching softball or people who are watching lacrosse. Yeah, for sure. So we're heading into 2025. There is, depending upon who you talk to, you'll hear widely differentiated views of the economy, the state of the markets overall. We have a new administration coming in.

[00:07:35] On one hand, you see consumers that have rising debt and credit card loans. On the other hand, the stock market is at all-time highs. What are you hearing from advertisers heading into 2025 in terms of their confidence in the economy and their ability to continue to spend on advertising at levels that we've seen over the last couple years? From my perspective at Disney Advertising Sales, as we discussed before, we have a very good hand.

[00:07:58] When you talk about having ESPN, ABC, Hulu's 15 years old, ABC's 73 years old, then you have Freeform, FX, Nat Geo, and everything in between. We feel like a lot of our partners right now, they are looking for fewer, bigger, better partnerships. So if you're going to look for fewer, bigger, better, really, Disney Advertising Sales is the place you're going to go. Because depending on what you're looking for, we have what you're looking for. If you're looking for live sports and you're looking to deliver there, we've got it. If you're looking for women's sports, we've got it.

[00:08:28] If you're looking for great content, because this is the other thing, we have Bob Iger and team, they've made a significant investment on all of our entertainment programming. We just picked up another live event a couple months ago where we have the Grammys starting in 2027. So now, in the first quarter of 2027, we're going to have the National Championship. We're going to have the Super Bowl in LA. We're going to have the Grammys, and we're going to have the Oscars.

[00:08:55] So that's a pretty massive stacked first quarter. And then you look at fourth quarter of every year, we have Ryan Seacrest, which is the top entertainment show, followed by massive college football ratings across the SEC and ACC. And then our Monday Night Football does very well as well. And then all of our primetime programming, just to mention a few like Dancing with the Stars, Bachelor, those type of things. So we feel like if you need to reach consumers, we have the way you're going to be able to reach them.

[00:09:22] Now, I imagine that when a brand comes to you, they're not just writing you a check and saying, get me X amount of impressions. They all want to do custom things that integrate their brand into your content. What are some of the interesting ways you'd be able to activate on behalf of brands that go beyond them just doing a traditional media buy? The great thing about us, you know, I oversee, as we talked about, the entire brand sales team. So what our team does is we make sure we go in. And my job is to go around the country and meet with CMOs and CEOs and even the CFOs,

[00:09:51] because the CFOs are at the check. Playing increasingly big role. Exactly. The CFOs are more important. It's to sit there and not only, you know, hear what they have to say. It's really the agency. You come from an agency background. My initial job out of college was from an agency. Agencies are still very pivotal in the organization, but it's more and more important. And I learned this when I was in L.A. for five years, because I've been at Disney for a while. When I was there for five years, spending a lot of time with the clients that the relationships really, really matter. So you need to listen to what their needs are.

[00:10:21] So building the relationships is a key, key component for us at Disney and for our team. And just as an example, we have many, many successful examples of things that we've done. But obviously when you have a successful campaign, it's like we did something for Hyundai and we launched their Tucson for them a handful of years ago. And we married some of our content with their creative and we used ESPN. We used The Bachelor. We used GMA. We did all these things. They had record sales for the Tucson.

[00:10:50] What did that do for us? They came back the next year and said, OK, this was fantastic. What can you do next? We said, well, actually, Disney's turning 100. And we had D100. They were our main sponsor for Disney 100. They came all in. They gave us a huge percentage of their budget. And we did something that's never been done before. You know, we married our content and their content. And they're creative. An Oscar spot that was a 60 that ran exclusively in the Oscars.

[00:11:16] And then we also created with the Disney Imagineers, we created a Disney Platinum 100 vehicle, Ionic 5. And they sold those at different dealers. That's very cool. A year later. And I can pretty much confidently say that'll be one of those things that might never be done before. Like, if you look in the wheels, there's a hidden Mickey. In the interior, there's different things. And you can imagine that at Disney, there's people that love that kind of stuff. And so Hyundai was thrilled. Those type of things, to get approved, they need to go up through the CEO and CFO.

[00:11:46] So that's just one of the many examples that we have. We'll be right back with the Speed of Culture after a few words from our sponsors. So you'd mentioned how you spend your time traveling a lot, meeting with CMOs, etc. And I believe sales is a lost art in a lot of ways, especially now in a world where we manage a fairly big sales team at Susie. And when you sell software, a lot of times they can come down to just, oh, I'm going to email people a million times. And when you're selling to big enterprises, you need to build relationships. You need to understand their business.

[00:12:13] What advice do you have for younger listeners that want to get into the world of sales in terms of some of the skills they should be honing at the earlier stages of their career so they can one day end up in a seat like yours, staying on top of an advertising organization at Disney? One of the most important things to me, and there was a little bit of a hiccup with the pandemic, is in person. And I have four kids, like I said, three are out of college. And I said, get in front of people. Yes. Okay, face-to-face is critical.

[00:12:40] It's very important for you to spend time with the people because that's how you develop a relationship. And also what I did is, like, I had a few people, I'm sure you did as well in your career, who helped you along. I had kind of navigated my way. I mentioned that I was in L.A. for five years. L.A. kind of really changed my trajectory in my career because I spent so much. It was during the dot-com boom. I met so many clients. There are certain things, forks in the road in your life where you realize, all right, this is going to change the trajectory.

[00:13:06] And I tell kids all the time because one of my kids went to Tulane, one went to Boston College, one went to USC. I have so many people reaching out to me, asking for advice. And what do I do? I try to meet with as many of them, and I say to them all the time, I have 15 minutes for you, so here's what I need from you after this. I need you to give other people down the road 15 minutes. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in paying it forward because when you meet with some of these younger people, you have no idea.

[00:13:33] I'm sure you do, but a lot of people don't realize how meaningful it is for that meeting that you're having with them. Because every meeting that they're having is just their legs are moving and they're feeling better about potentially their career. And I also do it selfishly because I want to make sure that we're building a better roster internally. Look, there's a lot of different industries. I've been very fortunate to be in this industry and feel like it's incumbent upon myself because people help me along the way that I want to help people as well.

[00:13:59] Yeah. I think one mistake I made earlier in my career is I'd be at a conference, and if somebody didn't have Nike or P&G on their badge, I'd go sit at the next table. And the reality is it's a long road, and you want to be building as many relationships with as many people as possible, especially when you're younger. And I was talking to Harrison Silverstein, who's a new remark, executive producer, that when you're younger in your career, you should be out every single night. You should be going to every single event you can, trying to meet as many people as possible.

[00:14:27] Because, you know, as you get older, sometimes you have family obligations. It gets a little bit harder for you to be able to do that. And if you build that network in the earliest stage of your career, you can mine that. Those people get older, more senior, and all of a sudden you have a great network, and your network's everything. You never know on a given day who you are going to meet, whether it's on a plane, whether it's on a train, wherever it is here at CES. So I couldn't agree more with that. You have to make sure you put yourself out there. You can necessarily say, you know what, I'm tired.

[00:14:57] I'm going to go to bed tonight. You never know who you're going to meet. It's what we were talking about off camera before. It's not six degrees. It's two degrees. And that person that you meet one night could actually change the trajectory of your entire career. It just takes one, right? Yep. All it takes is one. And in between those meetings, do you have any tips in terms of how to keep the relationships warm as well, whether it's like giving them content or just keeping in touch? Or is there any tricks that you've been able to, over time, amass that allow you to do that?

[00:15:25] I really feel like it's really important to gain their trust. Yeah. And so I'm a big person about just being real and genuinely friends with people. So a lot of the senior leaders that I'm friends with, the CMOs at different organizations, if I like somebody, I'm going to invest the time. And I truly believe that a real relationship, you cannot beat a real relationship. So to me, just be real, work hard.

[00:15:50] And I think it's working hard, not to sound on the older side, but working hard might be a little bit of a lost art to a degree. But I think we can get back there. I think there was a bit of a pandemic, like I said, hiccup. But just good old fashioned, working harder than others. When I was younger, it's cliche, but you got to work harder than, you know, work harder than everybody else. I agree 100%. And I know that you kind of mentioned this, that all your assets come with these like amazing live events. You have award shows and you have these incredible sporting events.

[00:16:18] Are you leveraging those events, A, as part of your sales approach, like in terms of hospitality and things like that? And also, do you have on-site activations as part of what you're offering to advertisers? Sure. So that's why tomorrow I'm going to the Goodyear Cotton Bowl because obviously Goodyear is going to be there. Yeah. But there's also a host of other clients. They're going to be there. Texas has a big following. Ohio State has a big following. And if you meet a CMO who went to Ohio State or Texas,

[00:16:44] they are going to do whatever it takes to come down to that game. Yeah. Okay. And then also Goodyear brings a ton of people. So it's very important for myself and some of the leadership team to make sure that we're down there. Because if we're not down there, what is that showing that how important it is? So it's not like it's a bad thing to go to a college football ballgame. It's certainly not. So these are on a lot of people's bucket list. Right. But at the same time, it's work. But I think it's vital.

[00:17:10] And we're also very fortunate because when you are at an event like a Super Bowl or a college football championship or an Oscars, these are bucket list events for people. And so you have, they're a little bit at ease. And then that's where I think you are able to develop like a deeper relationship. Yeah, they're attaching their relationship with you to this incredible experience. So I feel like personally myself, you give me 20 minutes with a CMO and I will have their cell phone number and we will be good, fast friends. And it's not in a phony way.

[00:17:39] I believe in really being real. And then the other thing really that comes down to is you can be friends with somebody and work with them. But at the end of the day, you need to make sure for these CMOs, because we all know how tough their jobs are. How much pressure they have. You have to deliver. So if you're delivering, so at the end of the day for us at Disney Advertising Sales, it's all about delivery. If we are able to deliver and delivery means driving sales for them, then it's a win for us and a win for them.

[00:18:06] So for me, when we do the pre-sale for people and we get them to buy something, it's not just about the pre-sale. It's actually about the post-sale. If it delivers for them, if it delivers for Goodyear, if it delivers for Hyundai, if it delivers for X client, then they're going to come back. We're going to say, okay, you know what? That made a huge impact on our sales. And so we've seen it. You know, another good example is College Game Day with Home Depot. They've been a partner for 21 years. It works really well and they are a good client.

[00:18:33] So we work hard for them, but it's also really important that it goes both ways. So for me, developing the relationships with the lead clients is critically important for myself and for the team. Yep. Obviously a big buzzword here at CES is AI. And I know different brands are pulling in different ways. Does AI play a role at all in terms of your overall offerings? And just curiously, are you using AI with your department to make you guys more efficient in your sales outreach? Yeah. I mean, I think we're using it a little bit.

[00:19:02] I think we're still in the infancy of it. And it seems like it's CES this year and last year. It was a big buzzword. I still feel like everybody's still trying to figure it out. Yeah, of course. Including myself. But I think it's going to play a decent role in the next couple of years. Absolutely. So shifting gears, as we wrap up here, I'd love to just hear a little bit more about your career journey. So obviously you focused a lot on relationships. When you look back at your career and the different moves that you've made,

[00:19:33] whether it's deciding to jump from one company to the next or working for specific individuals that either mentored you, etc. What were some of the decisions that you think you made right in the real rearview mirror that put you in a position that you're in today? So I started in New York City right out of college. McCann Erickson worked on Coke. And then my dream job was to work at one of the networks. And I was in sales and sales. And I got a job at ABC as a sales planner. And then my dream, you know, you go from one dream to the next.

[00:20:00] And my next dream was if I can become an account executive, then I've made it. So I was a director first. And then there was an opportunity in L.A. And I'm from New York City, only been to L.A. once before in my life. And my wife was pregnant with twins. And we made the decision. There was an account executive role for a great guy who was running the L.A. office, John Sadler, to work with him. And I took that shot. That was probably a huge pivotal decision in my career.

[00:20:25] So to get out of your comfort zone and actually move across country when you're about to have twins and change your entire life, it's huge. And I mentioned before it was during the dot-com boom. So that just all of a sudden there were companies coming. We were inundated with just people coming to talk to you because I was not just selling primetime. I was selling sports. I was selling news. So we were selling everything. And it just ballooned into an unbelievable opportunity. And that opportunity, I was going to spend two years in L.A. That was, you know, you have goals and then come back to New York.

[00:20:55] It ended up being five years. And then at five years, they asked me to come back as a VP in New York. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to do this because we were so happy. And it ended up being the best decision we made to go back to New York. So you have to make these tough decisions. It's not just it's important for your personal because it impacts your family. But these personal decisions make a huge impact on business. So that was probably the most pivotal moment. And I want to mention also because it's been terrible because I have one daughter in L.A. Yeah.

[00:21:24] I have my in-laws are in L.A. I have a lot of friends. It's been a tough week in L.A. So my thoughts go out to all those people because, as you know, it's a great city. It really is. All my thoughts and prayers go out to them. Thanks for saying that. When you look at young people that you're trying to hire and build your team, because obviously greatness is an agency of others. What are some of the traits when they walk in their room where you're like, they're going to make it. They're going to be good at what they do in the world of relationship building sales.

[00:21:52] I think for me, a lot of it is because it's hard when a 22 year old comes into your office and they're trying to pitch you on something. And I think to me, there's a bit of a gut feeling with people. And by the way, sometimes you're going to be wrong. Sometimes you're going to be right. But first and foremost, I think it comes back to being driven. And I also think I've seen it before. It may sound a little trite, but dress. If they come in sloppy, they got to be on time. There's little things to me that matter.

[00:22:21] But at the same time, the most important thing is just you can get a sense of their work ethic. I think the reason that I don't think dress sounds trite is because there's an old saying like how you do one thing is how you do everything. So if you're very detail oriented in terms of how you take care of yourself, how you write emails, you're not putting typos, then you know you're probably diligent in everything else. So they're basically signals that spill over into all other aspects of your life, which is why it matters.

[00:22:46] I mean, it's the you know, and I think that's changed with a lot of executives just in general. A lot of people aren't wearing ties anymore. But I think to me, you're exactly right on the dress. But to me, just showing up on time and you mentioned the resume people, you'd be surprised at like typos. And you know, a typo is a big deal because there's spellcheck. There's all these different things. So you should be able to figure that out. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, it's been a great discussion as somebody who spent his whole career in sales. I really have a lot of admiration for your career and what you've built.

[00:23:15] So thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule today. To wrap up our podcast, we normally ask our guests if there is a mantra or saying that comes to mind that has defined their professional journey. Does anything come to mind for you? I think for me is show up and give somebody 15 minutes. So I try to give everybody time because I think it's important because like I said before, giving somebody 15 minutes could actually change their life. Yeah. I am just like a big, big believer in everybody's too busy. We're all too busy. We don't have any time.

[00:23:45] Give that person. And that's why I tell the young kids, please give the time that I'm giving you to others down the road because it'll be more meaningful than you ever know. You heard it here straight from Andrew, everyone. If you're a senior level marketer and you are in a position of privilege and power, give that young aspiring person 15 minutes because they'll pay it forward to someone else one day. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a great discussion and wishing nothing but success in 2025. Same to you. Thank you very much. Absolutely.

[00:24:11] On behalf of Susie and I would team, thanks again to Andrew Messina, SVP of Disney Advertising for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform. We're here live at CES in Las Vegas. See you soon, everyone. Bye-bye. The Speed of Culture is brought to you by Susie as part of the Adweek Podcast Network and Agus Creator Network. You can listen and subscribe to all Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com slash podcasts.

[00:24:39] To find out more about Susie, head to susie.com. And make sure to search for the Speed of Culture in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Click follow so you don't miss out on any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Susie, thanks for listening. Bye.