The new pandemic had startled brands, causing many to press the pause button on ad spending – particularly upfront ad buys.
Fast-forward, however, and Michael Falco doesn’t think the upfronts are dying. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the chief revenue officer at Fox Corporation says they have learned new tricks – and Fox has seen an “influx” of buyers back to upfront sales over the last year.
Falco offers two reasons why:
“There’s still the need for a futures market,” he says. “In reality, what the last year and a half taught us was not that we needed to get away from the upfront, but that the upfront needed to evolve.”
“This notion that the upfront is just a linear television event is completely, completely wrong,” Falco argues. “Case in point for Tubi – we nearly tripled our revenue year-over-year in the upfront for TV, and we almost doubled our clients year to year.”
Falco isn’t ignorant of the effect the pandemic did have on upfront ad sales.
He says Fox had to figure out how to present its programming and ad products at a time when most potential customers would have been gathering in New York to hear its pitch.
But ad buyers, he says, fell into three camps:
Fox acquired Tubi, an ad-supported streaming TV service, for $440 million just as the pandemic panic was kicking off in early 2020.
Having Tubi in the stable has enabled Fox to make the kind of offering that ad buyers – during the pandemic or otherwise – were gravitating toward, namely choice, flexibility and audience targeting.
Tubi made more than $100 in ad revenue in the last quarter, more than $400 million over the year, according to its latest filing.
Falco says data-driven TV ad targeting is key. Fox has wrapped together its offerings under banners called “One Fox” and “Fox Next“.
“It’s going to allow us to move into that more audience-based selling, which I think is something that we’ve been looking forward to for quite some time,” Falco adds.
“Now that we have Tubi in the fold, it’s really going to give us the wherewithal to do that.”
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“It was such a fluid marketplace, and a lot of our clients were trying to figure out their business on the fly,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV.
In addition to helping advertisers, data insights help to understand where Fox’s media channels stand among rivals “so we understand that we’re getting the share in the market that we should be getting,” he said.
The data also provide “another opportunity for our salespeople to sit in front of a client and say, ‘Look, we understand. We know where you’re spending, and we know potentially why you’re spending, but give us the opportunity — because we feel that there’s a share shift here that’s going to benefit you and your business,” he said.
The automotive industry has seen different cross currents, such as a shortage of semiconductors that have slowed factory production and rising demand for electric vehicles. Those trends affect their media-buying decisions.
To gain more insights into its competitive stance, Fox recently performed a recap with Standard Media Index (SMI), which provides data on ad spending sourced from agency holding companies, to see how its National Football League broadcasts performed.
Because Fox has 42% of the gross rating points (GRPs) in NFL airings, Falco wanted to determine whether it was attaining a similar share in media spending for those games.
“Having that conversation with SMI, getting comparative data…and a look at the entire NFL marketplace and understanding what our competition is doing — and benchmarking ourselves against that — really helps us,” Falco said.
The data also help with inventory management amid the growing fragmentation of the media marketplace as viewers spend more time with streaming platforms, such as ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) and subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services.
Fox last year acquired streaming platform Tubi to diversity its distribution among households that are connecting their TVs to the internet. The platform is another channel for its news, sports and entertainment programming.
“We’re re-aggregating our audience,” Falco said. “We can touch our audience no matter the platform that they’re on.”
You are watching “Seeing Around Corners: Media Decisions During a Period of Disruption,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Standard Media Index. For more videos, please visit this page.
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