Fox’s new ad chief on Super Bowl 2025 and the presidential election ad marketplace

Fox is entering this year’s upfront with a new ad chief at its helm. Sales veteran Marianne Gambelli announced her retirement earlier this year, with Jeff Collins taking the lead as Fox enters an upfront ad market where colossi of tech and media are battling for ad dollars. Fox has some advantages built in for this year’s pitch to advertisers—it’s selling next year’s Super Bowl on the heels of this year’s all-time audience high, along with election packages for a top news network. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs And Collins sees Fox’s strength in its ad tech, which he said Fox isn’t recognized for enough. Last month, Fox announced it had revamped Tubi’s ad tech platform AdRise for advertisers to more easily buy inventory across its digital and linear assets. Collins said innovations like this help advertisers connect the dots between its audiences, which are different across Fox News, sports, entertainment and its streamer Tubi. “We don’t require as many hours of programming to actually drive as much reach as our competitive set because of how complementary the audience groups are,” said Collins. Ad Age sat down with Collins ahead of Fox’s upfront presentation on May 13 to discuss Super Bowl sales, the state of the news marketplace and standing out among the competition. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What can you tell me about early conversations around the Super Bowl heading into the upfront? We’re already engaged with clients and talking to them about Super Bowl. We’re very encouraged by the demand that we’re seeing as we head into it. Obviously, coming off of such an incredibly strong Super Bowl—audience levels were incredibly high, it went into overtime, there was a lot of momentum and buzz around it—we feel really good about taking it over this year. We’re going to be looking at ways that we can really capitalize on the full portfolio around the Super Bowl this year. It’s down in New Orleans, so there’s natural elements for food, and of course, the news team will be down there covering it as well. There are a lot of elements we could extend across the whole portfolio to really make it even bigger than it already is. [Note: Collins declined to comment on how streaming will play a role in the 2025 Big Game, but a Fox spokesperson specified that the Super Bowl will stream on the Fox Sports app] Outside of Super Bowl, what do you view as Fox’s highest-demand asset in the upfront? We’re seeing a tremendous amount of demand for Tubi. A lot of that is really being driven by incremental audiences, and it’s so important for advertisers these days in a very fragmented media landscape to drive incrementality. Tubi really delivers that. Tubi was designed to reach the cord-cutters and cord-nevers—it’s not trying to recreate the cable bundle like other streamers out there. [Read about Tubi’s recent rebranding effort] And sports is not just a Super Bowl. It is really year-round. We have sports in every single season. We’re seeing strong demand right now and a lot of momentum in ratings around the [United Football League], so spring football. And our MLB marketplace has been very robust. Fox recently launched new data-driven capabilities for its full portfolio via Tubi’s ad tech. What does that mean for buyers? AdRise was really built to unify our premium supply across all of Fox. It was also built to house our device graph—we have 200 million-plus unique IDs, 90 million-plus households. What AdRise facilitates for those clients is ultimately the ability to buy across the entire portfolio of Fox, and be able to control reach and frequency holistically. That does not preclude an advertiser from buying Tubi on its own, or buying Fox Entertainment on its own or Fox News on its own. But we are hearing increasingly from advertisers that they want to buy across the full portfolio and capitalize on those audiences because the audiences are so complementary across our portfolio. The cord-cutting audience within Tubi is very different from the news audience, which is different from sports and different from entertainment as well. Because they’re complementary, it adds a tremendous amount of incremental reach when advertisers are able to buy across the whole portfolio. How does Fox differentiate itself and stay competitive in the upfront market as it gets more crowded with tech companies and streamers such as Prime Video, Netflix and YouTube? As the marketplace does become more fragmented, scale matters more than ever. We feel scale is a big differentiator on Fox. Going back to that incrementality of audience, Fox is a very unique audience that’s hard to find elsewhere. Viewership within these big events that are very engaged is valuable to our clients, but so are the cord-cutters that they can’t reach when they’re buying into a lot of these other platforms or linear properties. The last thing I would say is good old fashioned storytelling still matters. And we hear that from our clients. We really prioritize deep integrations into our content in a way that is organic for that particular client. How is Fox strategizing around news and the election given advertisers’ hesitancy to be near increasingly polarizing discourse? We have a lot of advertisers that want to be part of our hard news content and really lean into that because of the engaged audiences there and because they also want to be able to support journalism. But for those that actually want to lean more into lifestyle content, we had an entire genre at scale of lifestyle content where you could still reach that engaged news audience, but you can do so in food, travel or weather content. We’re really allowing advertisers to be able to reach that audience in contextually relevant content that makes sense for their brands, but still get that deep engagement that news provides. We’ve seen 81 new national advertisers in news [since the beginning of Fox’s fiscal year beginning in July 2023]. We do business with between seven and eight of the top 10 advertisers in just about every single vertical, so they’re all advertising and airing on Fox News and across Fox News properties in some way. It’s just a matter of finding them the right content that’s contextually relevant for their brands. How well is your election coverage sold now versus being sold in the upfront? It’s a push for us in scatter. We’re out in the marketplace with those packages right now. We’ll continue to be for the election itself if we’re not sold out within our election coverage for the upfront. We have a couple of packages remaining for election. Being fresh in your role, are there any areas Fox hasn’t had strength in that you’re excited to dig into? We’ve been doing a lot around ad product and innovation for years. We haven’t publicized it as much as others have, but we’ve been doing shoppable opportunities for years. We have an AI-powered frequency management tool, so we’re utilizing AI and machine learning in a lot of our ad products. I talked about a device graph that’s on par with all of our major competitors out there. But as we look ahead, it’s really about accelerating those ad products and the speed to market that we have for getting those ad products out to our clients. And that is really just about allowing our clients to enhance the engagement that they have with our audience. The news of Marianne Gambelli’s departure felt sudden from the outside. Tell me about the transition and your promotion. Marianne was looking forward to retirement, and is certainly enjoying that now. It’s been an incredibly smooth transition. The team is doing great and we feel really good heading into this year’s upfront. I know Marianne had certain plans for a long time, but I don’t really have any comment on how long the transition was. What are the trends you’re seeing in the TV ad market that are informing Fox’s approach to the upfront? We see a healthy market, but it’s just a very diversified market. Clients have more choices than they’ve ever had before. So you really need to be strong in all of your offerings as you’re heading into a market like this. It’s probably not the best year to be the 10th or 15th-rated network, but those that are the top are going to do just fine. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

Fox’s new ad chief on Super Bowl 2025 and the presidential election ad marketplace

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