Fox’s head of ad sales believes the advertising market is making a comeback. 

As TV giants prepare for the all-important upfront selling season, Marianne Gambelli, president of advertising sales, marketing and brand partnerships, said she is seeing improvements in programmatic advertising and in the so-called scatter marketplace. 

But Gambelli noted that Fox is in a unique position compared to some of its competitors. “We don’t have all that cable entertainment, which was more challenged because of the oversupply of inventory as much as a weaker market. Clients are buying the things that work, and that’s live sports and news.”

It’s for this reason Gambelli believes Fox is better positioned than rivals to weather the woes currently plaguing the TV industry—including an unpredictable economy and the writer’s strike. 

Gambelli also sees Tucker Carlson’s exit from Fox News as creating more opportunity to welcome national advertisers back to the cable news network in prime time.

Fox reported third-quarter results this week, showing a 61% increase in advertising revenue for its broadcast and streaming properties due to the Super Bowl, NFL and its streaming platform Tubi year-over-year, and a 6.8% decrease in cable ad revenue. 

Over the past few months, Fox has hosted intimate events for advertisers, focused on Tubi and Fox News, in advance of its upfront presentation on May 15. Gambelli sat down with Ad Age to discuss sports shift to streaming, the controversial Fox News host and the “noise” around media measurement.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

As Tubi takes on a larger role in Fox’s upfront, how are you packaging it with your portfolio and presenting it to the ad market?

Tubi has had tremendous growth, 25% to 30% growth in ad sales. It's an important hot button for advertisers as they see AVOD as a place to access premium content and data target against certain audiences. It’s like the best of digital with premium content, so I think the money will shift there as well. Yes, it’s going to be a push for us, but I think it also matches what the advertisers are interested in.

Fox leadership has in the past been vocal about staying out of the streaming wars. How do you see Tubi competing against platforms like Disney+ or Peacock?

The reason [competitive streamers] are different is we don’t have a subscription service. We are 100% ad supported, so from an advertiser standpoint, we don’t confuse the consumer. We are not chasing subscriptions, and so the advertisers have access to all of Tubi’s content, where on those other platforms they don’t. And the reason why Fox is different—that we’re not chasing the streamers—is that we’re not losing money to chase this elusive audience with high cost originals. 

I think what advertisers are looking for is to understand what Tubi is. They like the uniqueness of it; they like that the audience is different from Fox, because then it’s additive reach. [While other streamers] just move assets from one platform to another, hitting the same consumer over and over, the way I think advertisers have embraced Tubi is it adds to what Fox already has.

News has become difficult to sell to major national advertisers, especially at Fox where it’s the subject of so much social media discourse even though it is a ratings juggernaut. How are you positioning Fox News at this year’s upfront?

There’s always a large swath of blue chip advertisers in news—it ebbs and flows. And it doesn’t depend on just social discourse. Sometimes they don’t want to be around war. News is tough, the subject matter is tough. So there’s lots of reasons why clients come in and out of news, but with elections coming up, I think the clients feel a certain responsibility and want to be there because they know that’s where the audience will be.

Social discourse is one thing, but Fox has such a powerful audience and it obliterates all of cable, nevermind just cable news. The Fox viewer watches Fox; they don’t watch a lot of other things. If you don’t buy Fox News, you’re going to be missing that audience.

Does the news about Tucker Carlson leaving his hosting position open any doors for you to pitch advertisers staying away from his content?

[Gambelli spoke with Ad Age before Carlson announced plans to host a show on Twitter]

Absolutely. We’re already seeing interest from advertisers, and if they did [leave previously], they just walked away from his hour. So we actually are seeing people that want to come back into the hour. The good news is we have a long bench of talent, and we’ve rotated out [hosts] before. We feel very confident that we will have a replacement soon and that the advertisers will feel very comfortable coming back.

Of course, we also have an election coming up. Does the uptick in political advertising cancel out any need to welcome back in advertisers?

I think we’re going to see both because a lot of blue chip advertisers—even though in the elections there’s a lot of discord, there always is—do feel that they want to be where the conversation is. So I think you’ll see blue chip advertisers, you will definitely see political dollars—we’re already starting to see that. It seems like elections now start a year earlier than they used to, so I don’t think it cancels it out, it’s just additive.

Last year, “Thursday Night Football” went to Amazon exclusively for the first time. In retrospect, did that impact your advertising business more, less or even with expectations?

The NFL is so powerful. It’s the number one show in all of TV. It’s a must-buy. In terms of marketplace, even what we’ve been through with economic uncertainty, the NFL marketplace was incredibly strong last fall. Football migrating to a streaming platform was inevitable.

I think Amazon still has to grow into it. I don’t think the audiences caught up to it, so it had a lesser impact because it just didn’t do the type of ratings—I think it did half the ratings that Fox did when we had “Thursday Night.” But, again, it is what the future is going to be. We believe that sports should be over the air and free and that’s going to be our position because we feel that that’s how to get the broadest audience. Amazon probably was more successful than it sounds given the transition of a property like that in one year. It takes the viewer a while to catch up.

What are your predictions for how sports will continue to transition from broadcast to streaming?

Right now, the money doesn’t make sense. You can’t get the revenue on a streaming platform that you can on over-the-air because of the scale. That will shift over time, and rights fees get more and more expensive. So the math has to work and right now it doesn’t, but companies like Amazon probably don’t care. I think it will get there, as all of the 90-year-olds die off because they’re never going to find it. 

Right now, the math makes sense and the audience makes sense on broadcast. You see select games on Peacock, you see what Amazon did and Apple probably will keep stretching their muscle in sports. So we see it continuing; we don’t feel that it pays off right now.

You mentioned the economy earlier—what are you hearing in conversations with advertisers?

Nobody’s saying, “Bad.” Nobody’s saying, “Good.” They’re just saying, “Uncertain,” and they’re saying that marketers are slow to release budgets because they just don’t know what’s coming. They’re trying to hedge their bets against inflation, against economic uncertainty. The scatter market wasn’t strong, but the money wasn’t weak either. It came in closer to air and that’s what we're seeing again, so the upfront may be slower to unfold.

What’s your stance on measurement for this year’s upfront?

We’ve taken a customized approach to it: we’re not supporting one vendor over another, we’re not forcing a certain amount of revenue to be transacted on alternate demos or another rating source. We’re a little upset with Nielsen right now over the switch around the big data—they pulled that back. We’re working with everyone but we’re still in—I don’t want to say test-and-learn because we’re past that, but we want to be agnostic and work with advertisers how they want to work until we have a clearer picture of [what measurement provider] is stable and who’s not. And clients want to bring their own data—that’s the other side of this. So, just trying to figure that all out, but not taking a position of forcing clients to do something that they’re not comfortable with and that we’re not comfortable with.

Fox is in the Joint Industry Committee hosted by OpenAP, but has been less public facing in it than other media companies. What are your thoughts on the JIC?

There’re so many unknowns [among new currencies] and there’s just more noise than there is reality. We’re actively trying to solve this. But we feel it’s just creating a lot of confusion for clients, and Nielsen has now walked away from negotiating with JIC, so that’s a problem. We need to come together as opposed to a lot of positioning in the press.