More than 4,000 brands have advertised on Disney+ across Europe, the Middle East and Africa since the platform’s ad tier launched in the region in 2023, Disney Advertising told clients at its UK upfront event in London this week.
The milestone, reported by Advanced Television and The Media Leader from the October 6 event, came with a set of growth numbers aimed at media buyers weighing 2027 plans. Disney said revenue for its UK advertising business was up 80 percent year on year, and that more than 50 sponsorships have been activated on Disney+ in the UK, with more in development.
Audience figures from Barb for the second quarter of 2026 back the pitch: reach of the Disney+ ad tier in the UK grew 58 percent year on year, and monthly viewing hours rose 49 percent over the same period. Disney executives attributed part of the jump to the service being bundled into eligible Sky packages from March, while crediting the pull of its franchises — Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, Hulu, FX and ESPN — as the deeper driver. The company noted that 43 percent of UK Disney+ viewing hours come from 16-to-34-year-olds, a cohort advertisers struggle to reach through linear television.
The commercial infrastructure behind the numbers has been expanding too. Disney extended its own ad server into EMEA this summer, positioning it as a more connected system for planning, activating and measuring campaigns at scale, alongside audience-graph and planning tools that mirror the unified buying message every major TV seller carried into this year’s upfront season.
Brand integration is the next frontier Disney is selling. The first UK integration of its kind launched earlier this year, tying retailer Waitrose to the second series of drama Rivals, and the upfront showcased upcoming titles across film and series as future sponsorship and integration inventory — from returning dramas to Marvel releases and National Geographic programming, capped by a preview of a new Stanley Tucci travel series.
The London event formed part of a broader upfront week in which Amazon, Netflix and UK publishers also made their pitches, underlining how completely the centre of television advertising has shifted to streaming platforms with first-party data and measurable outcomes.
For advertisers, Disney’s message is that scale is no longer the question: with thousands of brands already buying, the competition has moved to sponsorships, integrations and data-driven planning. On Friday, October 9, 2026, the ad tier that launched as an experiment three years ago is being sold as core television inventory.
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