Fox brought Tubi to both NewFronts and upfronts this year and distinguished it both from competitors and within the Fox portfolio. What has the buyer reaction been to an established Tubi, and how does ad interest on the platform differ from the rest of the portfolio?
We wanted to take part in both the NewFront and upfront. This year, we approached them differently: The NewFront, we approached more with our technology announcements and data announcements, whereas the upfronts were much more around content, creativity, and programming.
The Tubi value prop is very complementary to Fox. We have these massive live audiences in sports and news. We have a big broadcast creation vehicle, and then Tubi complements that by reaching the cord-cutters and cord-nevers, and it’s really designed to reach that audience. So advertisers have taken note, and what they appreciate more than anything is the incrementality of that audience and the reach that it extends to what they’re getting with linear programming.
Fox illustrated some of the synergy between Tubi and its other properties by showing NFL teams and players acting out scenes from Sidelined: Me and the QB. Does that get ad buyers moving around the portfolio a bit?
For our advertisers, it really comes down to the audience and how it complements what they’re doing across the rest of our portfolio. That’s why they buy Tubi in conjunction with a lot of our live offerings in terms of the programming. What you’re seeing is it’s really being programmed for a different audience, quite frankly, than what you might find on linear. It’s being programmed for younger, diverse cord-cutters and cord-nevers, and a movie like Sidelined really accomplished that by bringing in Noah Beck and Siena [Agudong] and their social connections that obviously drove tremendous numbers for the first five or six days of viewership.
That’s a model we’re going to be moving forward with to continue to engage with these young audiences that are just increasingly hard to reach.
Fox News made a strong, metrics-heavy pitch for the news division that didn’t veer into discussions of brand safety. How does that approach work out for the network?
We’ve seen a tremendous amount of interest from advertisers heading into this year’s upfront around Fox News, being driven by a number of things.
One is just the dramatic audience growth that it continues to see even post-election. First-quarter, Adults 25-54 numbers were up 58%. It was the second-highest-rated network after CBS in all of TV. The sheer scale is hard to ignore in all of media.
Then, on the other side, is just the coverage that we’ve had. We tried to highlight that throughout the upfront with Bret Baier and the interviews that he’s had with everyone from [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, the night that he was in the White House, to Bernie Sanders last week… folks from all sides of the aisle. He’s getting the biggest newsmakers, and they’re coming to him.
And you’re seeing Democrat involvement in digital.
It’s become the hottest platform for Democrats to publish their columns. So [California Governor Gavin Newsom], [Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren], [former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg] have all penned pieces on FoxNews.com, and that’s one of the things that’s driving the 120 million uniques that FoxNews.com has.
We’re seeing it across linear, where the content that we’re delivering is incredibly strong. It’s reaching diverse audiences politically, so more Democrats and more independents than the competition, and more Republicans as well, and advertisers have taken notice. We’ve had over 200 new advertisers since the election that have come on board.
