Launching Pause Ads on Hulu

In 2018, I was tasked with supporting Hulu’s head of advertising platforms from a comms perspective to build out our advertising innovation story and identify potential product announcements and news pulses for the upcoming year. He had started in June / July of 2018, so our goals were to introduce him to the market and drive Hulu’s reputation as a leader in OTT advertising.

After meeting with our executive and his team to solidify goals and identify upcoming product releases, I created a communications plan to share news about a new feature called the pause ad, an interstitial that appears when Hulu viewers press pause during their viewing experience.

To seed the idea, we went on a few coffee meetings with press to introduce them to our new ad product executive and also seed the idea of new ad formats we were creating (including pause ad). This led to major interest from key publications like Variety, AdAge, and TechCrunch, with Brian Steinberg at Variety deciding to pursue an initial story.