There is no official record book for the upfronts, but Fox might have made history Monday by having its chief technology officer address advertisers from the stage.
Fox gets 200 million people each month engaging with its linear TV networks, streaming services and podcasts, CTO Melody Hildebrandt said.
“Technology innovation is core to Fox,” she said. “Our sports team has pushed the boundaries of live production since day one. And when we acquired Tubi six years ago, our technology center of gravity moved to Silicon Valley. We now run more than 2,000 product experiences yearly, and we were the first streamer to natively integrate into ChatGPT. We’ve spent the last two years doing something that most media companies haven’t, partnering with frontier AI labs.”
Ad sales chief Jeff Collins reinforced the tech-forward approach by characterizing the evolution of Fox Corp., which started in 2019 as the remnants of 21st Century Fox. The company’s film studio, cable networks and stake in Hulu were shipped off to Disney in a $71.3 billion deal, leaving the broadcast network, local stations, sports and Fox News.
“Fox is built from the ground up by focusing on the fundamentals. We stripped our company down to its most essential components by five sports, and news, and no new fox up from those solid foundations,” Collins said. “In the technology business, they call this first principles, a way of breaking down complex issues to their fundamentals, or first principles, and building up a better solution from them. In addition to Fox, first principles thinking is used by some of the world’s fastest growing companies,” among them Space-X.
In another departure from upfront protocol, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch spoke for several minutes, . (Customarily, CEOs tend to be seated and often acknowledged from the stage.) “This focus on our most deeply engaged viewers isn’t just verbiage. It’s how we designed and built our business,” Murdoch said.
The tactic of foregrounding technology reflects the changing asset mix at Fox, which has made a number of M&A deals in the tech sector and last year entered subscription streaming with the launch of Fox One. Former longtime Apple exec Pete Distad is overseeing the service. It also suits a transformed upfronts week, which has come to feature tech giants Amazon, YouTube and Netflix vying with traditional media companies with linear TV networks.
Hildebrandt said the company uses AI to analyze “every second of our raw video in real time, extracting topic, talent, mood, and vibes, and joining that against performance data, to understand what content and advertising is resonating with our audiences at a fan level.”
The company treats Fox One as “our innovation playground,” Hildebrandt said. It will soon launch an interactive feature with FS1 host Colin Cowherd, Hildebrandt said, and has also ramped up an ad studio capable of incorporating millions of interactions across digital and linear.
Fox’s ad sales division is also bringing “AI-native” solutions to ad buyers, with a “contextual engine” offering “rapid evaluations of campaigns against performance objectives,” the exec added.
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