“It’s designed to be watched live, it draws great audiences. It’s not designed to be viewed on demand,” says Dan Callahan, Fox’s vp of audience and automated sales, speaking to Beet.TV during an interview at Advertising Week. “Live only happens once and we’re excited about that.”

Live sports is only one piece of the puzzle, though, and Callahan says that like most other networks, Fox is figuring out its own direct-to-consumer play and subscription model (a betting component might be up next). The goal is “to be the best facilitator and partner for brands and agencies to come activate against,” says Callahan, and in service of that, Fox is working across a wide range of partnerships in order to light up the most inventory and match databases to Fox’s audience network. It’s currently splintered across linear TV’s MVPD, smart TV manufacturers and digital channels like Hulu, says Callahan.

One solution to that separation is OpenAP, which Fox is a founding participant in. OpenAP, which is an across-industry platform that consolidates premium TV programming and inventory into one place, was established in order to bring more transparency to ad inventory buying across new TV platforms. Callahan says OpenAP has gotten a new “shot at life” now that CEO David Levy is building a dedicated team for the initiative. “It’s been refreshing to have a group of thoughtful individuals focused wholeheartedly on the project,” says Callahan.

For Fox, the point of OpenAP is to standardize the process around audience definition, and make it easier for brands and agencies to work more holistically with the network.

“We’re trying to create a transactional workflow for a very manual process today, and if it can become an enter-exit point for planning and posting campaigns, we think we’ve got the ability to be successful and add value,” says Callahan.

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

In this interview with Beet.TV, Midha provides details about how the use of a one-question survey in a TV ad pod with the true[X] Uplift product can provide a myriad of insights about viewers in relation to their status in the purchase funnel.

Formerly a unit of FOX Networks and now owned by Walt Disney Co., true[X] is used across most broadcast and cable networks plus the Twitch gaming platform and OTT services, among others. “We really focus on high-attention environments. Places where there’s a really engaged consumer on the other end and where we think we can make the experience better,” says Midha.

Calling CTV an “incredibly rich canvas,” she talks about engagement ads for a variety of brands from Amazon to Lego to Harley Davidson to consumer packaged-goods, “which shows that this is a format that works for any number of categories.” A voice-enabled, engagement ad for Amazon’s Echo used speech-to-text conversion so that viewers could verbally interact with the ad.

Whereas ad attribution “only tells about a sale,” when brand lift occurs “you usually will see conversion down the chain,” says Midha, adding that because not all viewers are always in market for something, all ads provide value to brands.

“It’s still seeding an awareness, it’s still driving perception and it may even be creating preference so that when that consumer is in market, they will convert for that brand.”

The company is working with “several partners to use Uplift to measure video performance on their own sold campaigns” via the Uplift technology but apart from true[X]’s own engagement-ad units, according to Midha.

Giving viewers a choice of their ad experience and collecting the resulting data at scale can turn a one-question survey into a gold mine of information, she says.

“You can imagine it’s not very hard to get a lot of people to choose to take that survey, especially when it’s only one question. We let consumers place themselves on the purchase funnel by asking them how they would describe their relationship with a brand.”

A “control and expose group” can number 500-plus within days of a campaign launching, “and we also are able to make sure that the cohort for exposed looks like the cohort for control, both of which look like the cohort that was actually targeted for the campaign. So your survey group mirrors your campaign targeting.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“Our biggest form of competition in human attention in the entertainment television space is ad-free viewing environments versus ad-supported viewing environments,” says Noah Levine, Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions for Fox Networks Group.

Fox aspires not only to preserve TV as an ad-supported medium but also to “enhance its market messaging, its brand safety, its effectiveness and the quality of ad recall,” Levine says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Fox used the occasion of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity to lend its weight to the six-second ad format that YouTube launched last year, as Advertising Age reports. Fox’s six-second ads will be shown to viewers across its digital and on-demand properties, where they will be unskippable, along with linear TV.

The rationale behind supporting six-second ads is that if agencies and advertisers are embracing a format that reduces the amount of time people are obligated to spend watching commercials while supporting advertisers’ goals, “That’s something that we’re absolutely willing to embrace and experiment with,” Levine adds.

Fox’s FX Networks already has some of the most Emmy nominated and awarded TV content that is ad-supported. To preserve and enhance the viewer experience, FX has crafted an option for set-top box, video-on-demand and digital content.

Under this scenario, “essentially an advertiser would own the entire ad viewing experience for an individual viewer and craft a story from a brand messaging perspective, from pre-roll to each and every mid-roll,” Levine explains.

Another FX offering consists of sponsored ad breaks wherein mid-roll positions “can be one ad that isn’t competing for attention along with four other 30-second ads for the viewer.”

Fox’s limited-ad options can be targeted to specific types of content, whether it’s FX originals, movie or other programming, according to Levine.

With audience-based targeting, Fox seeks to go beyond age and gender. “Let’s go into enhanced demographics. Let’s look at the third-party data sets that are out there” to deliver the most effective and engaging advertising “that’s as relevant as possible to the end user.

”This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying the New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.

In an interview with Beet.tv, Marchese traces the path to the current state of consumers and their tolerance—or lack thereof—of ads from a longstanding blind spot.

For too long, the TV industry “thought too little about what consumers want and just thought this was a negotiation that was happening between content owners and advertisers,” says Marchese, who is President of Advanced Advertising at Fox. “In reality, it was a three-party negotiation: content owners, advertisers and viewers.”

The last group have “fought back” as evidenced by the rise of ad blockers, DVR’s, Netflix, Hulu Ad-Free and other choices, according to Marchese.

He cites “the rash of virtual MVPD’s” like AT&T’s new streaming offerings and as he looks ahead to CES 2017, believes there’s no doubt that TV and video content will increasingly be delivered via IP.

“If that’s true and people are going to be logging in to watch television even on the big screen at home, what does that finally mean for advertisers?” Marchese posits. “How do we realize that?”

Among other things, he sees IP delivery fostering personalized ads and enabling advertisers to become “smarter about targeting and reduce ad loads because the ads get better and more relevant.”

To Marchese, creativity doesn’t always mean interactive ad design. “Sometimes it means designing different length commercials for different viewing experiences,” he says. “Sometimes it will mean designing sequential commercial messages.”

In an IP environment, “We know that a person has seen commercial one,” Marchese says. “Let’s show them commercial two now. That’s a whole new way to think about advertising than a simple reach and frequency.”

In any event, more consumer choices have put the market in a very different place. “Content owners and marketers are going to need to work together more than ever before,” says Marchese.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017.  The series is presented by FreeWheel.   Please find more vidoes from the series here.