Reduced Churn With Disney+’s First Loyalty Program

When I was at Disney+, the streaming wars had exploded the number of Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) services. Investors demanded growth at all costs and a fast path to profitability, so subscriber acquisition dominated. Churn was tracked as a KPI but sat in the back seat. As growth slowed in high-penetration markets like the U.S. and after global expansion, macroeconomic pressure on consumer wallets, frequent price increases across multiple services, content troughs between big releases, and near-zero switching costs (sign up or cancel in seconds, no contracts or truck rolls) created a perfect storm. Unlike cable or satellite, where high rip-and-replace costs locked people in, SVOD made it effortless to churn and burn then re-subscribe later. Even with Disney’s generational brand affinity and “Disney adults,” we still saw meaningful voluntary churn—especially among casual fans who only cared about a few franchises (I’m mostly a Star Wars and Nat Geo guy myself).

We started by clearly defining the problem—reduce voluntary churn—then mined the data for leading indicators and formed a hypothesis: introducing subscriber rewards would cut churn among redeemers and create a broader halo effect simply from members knowing the program existed. Next we ran broad quantitative and qualitative research with both Disney+ subscribers and non-subscribers to learn which rewards actually mattered: free or early access, freebies, sweepstakes, gamification (badge journeys for finishing shows like The Mandalorian), discounts across Disney parks, consumer products and the Disney Store, plus relevant third-party offers such as food-delivery credits. Those insights shaped the strategy so we built what customers wanted, not what we assumed they wanted.

We then tested a subset of offers with segmented audiences to validate the hypothesis before committing to a full program—critical because walking back a launched loyalty product is painful. Casual fans and loyal fans had different desires, so we tailored tests accordingly.

Every reward had to tie straight back to the Disney+ subscription (“unlock this as a member”) so the value felt attributed to the service rather than random.

One memorable test was a seven-day National Geographic Galápagos cruise sweepstakes; it drew massive entries and also lifted Nat Geo viewing on the platform, proving rewards could drive core engagement metrics that ultimately reduce churn.

A major fork in the road was build versus buy. Building internally would let us make it uniquely Disney and turn it into a one-time capital expense, but it would fight for scarce engineering resources, risk years of delay, create ongoing tech debt, and pull focus from the core streaming product. Buying a loyalty SaaS platform gave us speed to market (we wanted to be first in streaming), expert ongoing enhancements, far lower internal resourcing, and enough customization to still feel Disney—despite integration complexity and recurring cost.

I recommended buy; after contentious debate with leaders who preferred build, we aligned on buy. We ran a collaborative RFP across roughly fifty loyalty SaaS providers, assembling a tiger team of marketing, data analytics, product and engineering so the decision was shared rather than made in a vacuum. Product marketing owned the initiative (one of the few times something this large was marketing-led), with a core team of six product managers and product marketers.

Lifecycle marketing handled the emails and pushes, but there was no separate loyalty org—PMM was that team. Throughout we kept asking whether a full loyalty program even made sense, forcing top-down leadership alignment and constant cross-functional checkpoints to avoid blind spots.