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Why & How Disney+ Could Become An Unrivaled Social Commerce Platform

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Mashups are fun, and no one has been better at mashups over the years than the Walt Disney Company. The great Mickey Mouse himself is in fact a mashup, one of human bipedalism and rodent cuteness, to say nothing of his ability to captain a steamboat. The company that has given the world everything from whistling while you work to letting it go amid German and Danish fairytale backdrops always finds new ways to regale its audience.

Disney+ is no different.

On the surface, it looks like a no-brainer move to claw back lost ground from streaming services like Netflix and others, but under the covers it is so much more. Disney+ could actually be the foundation of a new social commerce world for Disney, one in which Disney owns both the content and the distribution, not just of its movies, but of its toys too.

Put that in your Jiminy Cricket pipe and smoke it, Amazon Prime Video.

The horizontal line of social commerce

Social commerce is one of the biggest trends influencing retail right now. The best way to think about social commerce is as a horizontal line, like the ones depicted in the picture below:

Social commerce is at its core a closed-line relationship between a network or community on one end and a marketplace on the other. The best way to think about this line is to imagine the social network capabilities of a Facebook or an Instagram on one end of the line and the commerce capabilities of Amazon on the other. Whoever controls such a line end-to-end ultimately has a tremendous data advantage when it comes to understanding its customers.

Facebook understands this fact. So does Amazon. It is why Facebook continues to fortify Instagram and its namesake marketplace, and also why Amazon is so hell bent on getting into our homes via Alexa. Search engines like Google or even Amazon’s own search bar know what consumers explicitly want, but social networks know what they implicitly want as well. It is this combination of explicit and implicit understanding of consumers that makes the connected line of social commerce so powerful.

Translation — it all ultimately leads to click-to-buy in the moment and in nanoseconds.

And, don’t look now but Disney+ is the start of one end of the line.

The Disney+ advantage

Early indications are that Disney+ subscriptions are rocketing northward faster than a Mandalorian rushing to protect a baby Yoda. Latest reports are that Disney+ already has over 10 million subscribers.

Said another way, Disney can now speak to a captive audience of 10 million people (and growing) whenever the hell it wants. Disney can track, monitor, serve up recommendations in the moment to whomever happens to be viewing everything from the latest Star Wars flick to the Son of Flubber. For Netflix, this same capability means serving up other movies or video content for consumers to watch, for Amazon it might mean trying to entice people to buy things from its marketplaces, but, for Disney, this concept opens up a whole new world of additional commerce potential.

All of which struck me like a thunderbolt from the Norse god Thor, when my nearly five-year-old son couldn’t take his eyes away from some dude in a mask made of Beskar steel (aka the Mandalorian) over the weekend.

What hit me the most was that Disney could mash up toy unboxing videos on YouTube with live-stream commerce in a way where Disney not only has control over the content, but also over the product too. The experience could come to life much in the same way an exclusive Nike sneaker drop happens on the Nike Sneakers app. Only this time, it could all happen right alongside anyone’s choose-your-own adventure favorite programming.

Amazon can’t do that. 

Only Disney can create the exclusive Elsa doll with the special sequined dress or the exclusive Boba Fett with the rocket launcher. The best Amazon can hope for is to get the rights to sell the products elite companies create, and, if Nike’s stiff arm announcement to Amazon last week is any indication, the chance that exclusive content providers do that for Amazon going forward is probably smaller than Ant Man.

Disney then, should it want to, has the ability to close the line, to speak to its community of watchers, and to conduct and close commerce with them in the moment. All that remains for Disney is to parlay the Mandalorian fever and take the steps to get there.

The ultimate commerce mashup

The craziest thing? The blueprint to this ultimate closed end-to-end commerce mashup is already out there. Take a look at what Walmart is doing this year via its interactive Toy Lab with eko in the video below:

The technology showcased in the video works with all kinds of video content. It is interactive, one-to-one, and again comes at consumers right at the moment of inspiration, like when my five-year-old can’t stop staring at a baby Yoda’s oversized eyes. It is about creating experiences for kids (and adults) in a manner that is different than traditional retailing but still, over the long-run, brings with it all the aspects consumers love — inspiration, convenience, and confidence in what they purchase.

There is nothing to stop Disney from taking this very same type of technology and deploying interactive commerce to my five year-old and countless other kids like him right after or even during the latest episode of the Mandalorian. All it takes is an ability to stick with experiments in this vein and to refine them over time.

Albeit, now is too early for such experiments. There is no sense spoiling the uptrend with unnecessary add-ons right now. But, quietly and by way of small test groups, Disney can refine concepts like these until all the kinks are worked out and then unveil them to drive fervor over their new releases and toys, and thereby keep as much of the profits as they can either for themselves or for their chosen distribution partners. 

It’s content that is unique. That is special. That is can’t find it anywhere else but Disney. 

10 million Disney+ subscribers is strong out of the gates for sure, but what’s even stronger is what it all could signal in the long-run — the ultimate mashup of commerce and content.

Or, as I like to call it, the new Tomorrowland.

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