Fox used the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl to highlight its IndyCar coverage, which saw a 25% uptick in viewership last season during Fox broadcasts. Considering the recent success of open-wheel racing in the U.S. through Formula 1 and its narratives around drivers and teams, how have Fox’s IndyCar campaign and its upfront segment with team owner David Letterman and two-time Indy 500 champion Josef Newgarden sold the circuit to buyers?
One of the benefits of Fox is that we have this tremendous promotional platform across all of our live assets, and we’ve been able to utilize that to promote IndyCar. Robert Gottlieb, who’s our CMO on the sports side, has been able to produce some amazing creative that connects fans to the actual drivers and the drivers’ stories, just helping them become more relatable. I think you’re seeing that having an impact as well.
The IndyCar fans are incredibly engaged, but then it’s also introducing a whole new set of fans to IndyCar and having them realize how exciting and dynamic the actual races are, and we do that through a number of different ways. Marketing is obviously one of them, including our non-motorsport talent in IndyCar events like the Indy 500, where Michael Strahan will drive the pace car. We’ll have other high-level talent there as well, and all of those things help to bring in new audiences and expose them to the races.
Speaking of the Fox platform, the Fox One streaming platform was announced before the upfront, but didn’t play a major role in it. What has the rollout looked like, and how is it being presented to buyers seeking inventory around its fall launch?
You heard [Fox Corporation executive chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch] speak about it on our earnings call that the service is really designed to reach cord-cutters and cord-nevers and truly provide an incremental audience on top of our linear audiences and advertisers.
In terms of the advertising experience for the first six months or so, our live content will have pass-through ads, so our existing advertisers that are buying into our linear properties will get the added audience benefit of the new signups that are coming on into Fox One. Those will be incremental audiences from what they’re currently getting with their normal linear buys. And then on the VOD side, that will be supported with dynamic ad insertion, so we’ll be able to insert ads into the VOD stream there. So we’re excited about it, and we’re getting quite a few questions from advertisers about it as well, and they’re excited to tap into new audiences that have been very elusive for them through other channels.
