EXCLUSIVE: While Fox Corp.‘s sports division is known for generating fan engagement, the company is increasingly aiming to showcase its capabilities across the board in leveraging fandom.
At CES in Las Vegas this week, four senior execs at the company laid out that strategy for a crowd of high-level advertisers at a luncheon panel discussion attended by Deadline. Jeff Collins, President of Ad Sales, Marketing and Brand Partnerships, moderated the session, kicking off with some high-level thoughts and internal research showing the impact of fans.
“Fandom really exists across our portfolio,” he said. “When anybody thinks of fans, the think immediately of sports. But anyone who knows Fox News knows there are rabid fans of Fox News out there. We see it in entertainment with shows like The Masked Singer.” Tubi, he added, “is one of the only streaming services out there that has fans of the platform itself.”
Brand favorability increases with greater fan interest, Collins noted, citing the internal data. “That’s really important because people come to fans for recommendations,” he said.
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Joining Collins were Melody Hildebrandt, CTO of Fox Corp.; Nicole Parlapiano, CMO of Tubi; and Julian Franco, President of Operations & Strategy of Fox Corp.
Hildebrandt described herself as an “AI optimist” and said the increasingly ubiquitous technology is helping fortify the company’s efforts to engage fans heading into next month’s Super Bowl telecast on Fox. “Fandom is shifting and evolving and changing,” she said. “A lot of where fandom is expressed today is in the group DMs, in the group chat.” With new tools, she added, “People can come to us to dominate the group chat” by being able to quickly summon statistics on their favorite players or teams – or unfavorable insights about rival teams and players. “You’re allowing us to talk better trash,” Collins joked.
Parlapiano said Sidelined: The QB and Me, a feature film that debuted on Tubi last November and became one of the top-viewed original across all of streaming, shows the potency of fans. Because TikTok influencer Noah Beck played the lead of the film, which is based on a YA novel, it generated huge interest without the typical need for a conventional (and pricey) marketing campaign. Instead, the main goal was to feed the fans and let them do most of the evangelizing.
“I gave them deleted scenes, I had a couple of fans come to the set and shoot some things,” the exec recalled. “The amount of spread was– People who were fans of this book were so delighted to see him in his first acting debut and he did so well. But also we set the breadcrumbs along the way.” About 20,000 viewers wound up creating social content about their experience of watching the movie, she added, and one third of the film’s total audience has watched it at least twice.
Another fan-oriented Tubi initiative is Stubios, which is a creator-based venue for originals. Parlapiano mentioned Issa Rae, who began as a popular YouTuber before leveraging that following to make Insecure for HBO. “We haven’t seen a lot of those like that, and that was a long time ago,” she said, noting that Rae is an advisor to Stubios. “There is a need for it and what’s great is that it has this flywheel of the fans being very engaged in the very content they’re creating. It’s not coming directly from Tubi. We’re honoring their voice.”
Franco mentioned Gordon Ramsay as another key talent ally in the effort to generate fandom.
“One of the things that fosters a worldwide swath of fans is that he is involved,” Franco said. “It’s really hard for him to go away for weeks at a time to produce a show, but it’s really easy for him to do a ‘Ramsay Reacts.’” A decided Instagram account, “ramsay_reacts,” showcases attempts by amateur chefs and fans to cook things. They send them to Ramsay and he reacts. “Stuff you see in Kitchen Nightmares but for an individual user.”
Many AI-enabled videos have used Ramsay and Fox programming, depicting the chef and his creations in off-the-wall ways, Franco said. “There’s going to be more of that, so at some point you’re going to have to embrace it and then learn to kind of lean in with the fans. … Sooner or later, we’ll figure out how to aggregate it, how to put a product around it, how to build a community around it and, ultimately, how to bring partners into it.”
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