With The Walt Disney Co. set to significantly expand its streaming advertising business, Rita Ferro is expanding her purview at the entertainment giant.

Ferro is being elevated to president of global advertising for Disney, giving her direct oversight of the company’s global advertising footprint. The expanded role comes as Disney is set to launch advertising tiers of Disney+ in Europe starting next month, and in other global markets early next year.

Ferro says that her team in Europe has been working with partners for some time to get ready for the launch.

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“They have been talking about the slow rollout we’ve planned — intentionally — we learned a ton in the U.S. It is not day one everybody shows up,” Ferro says, adding that they are focused on “how we help customers come in and how they use the product and you want to manage it, so that you can make sure that you deliver campaigns for clients in a timely process, and in the scope of time that they would like that those campaigns to be delivered.”

Ferro also notes that Disney+ has some different programming in different markets “so that they want to make sure that they’re able to deliver it market by market.”

Disney launched the advertising tier of Disney+ less than a year ago, and according to Ferro, the interest in consumers has picked up since then.

Ferro says that more than 50 percent of new subscribers to Disney+ are choosing the ad tier (that is up from 40 percent earlier this year), and that engagement on the ad version of the streaming service has increased by 35 percent since March.

“Engagement is one of the key metrics for advertising, so it’s a really important metric that we track,” Ferro says.

Disney also raised the subscription price of Disney+ in August, but only for its ad-free tiers, gently nudging consumers to its less expensive ad plan. That was also when it announced the global expansion of the tier.

“We’ve been very, very cautious in terms of how we forecast and plan that rollout to make sure that we’re delivering with partners and that we have flexibility in how we’re doing deals,” Ferro says.

Beyond expanding internationally, Disney is bringing other functionality to its Disney+ ad tier as well. Ferro says that as of this week, biddable programmatic inventory is live on the platform, and that the company has expanded its targeting capabilities to include demos (like age and gender) but also geography and Disney Select Audience Segments.

“It gives them choice and control in the way they choose to buy, whether it’s direct through programmatic guarantees or now through biddable channels,” Ferro says.

The executive says that two key deputies, Jamie Power (who oversees addressable enablement) and Dana McGraw (who runs data science, audience modeling and attribution) now report directly to her, a sign of how the company is leaning into automated ad buying processes.

The company is also adding new types of creatives to Disney+, including -15 and -90 second ads. Ferro says that sponsorships have become a robust business for the company.

“In the market today on Disney+ we have all of our holiday sponsorships out for sale,” Ferro says. “We are very, very excited about where we are from a product roadmap perspective. I think we’re in a great place.”

Disney is also planning to hold its annual advertising tech and data showcase in-person for the first time, at the Chelsea Theater at the CES conference in Las Vegas in January.

“In the last I would say five years, [CES has] become really a kicking off point for starting the upfront-season conversation in a much more robust and direct way,” Ferro says. “The great thing about CES also is that you have a lot of international participants as well. CES and Cannes [the Cannes Lions advertising festival] both have a lot of international participants. So it’s places where we actually have had meetings on a global scale across brands and partners, and it just made sense to do it there.”

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