Dive Brief:
- Fox made waves at this year’s TV upfronts including a decision to stop selling traditional commercials on the FX network’s digital and on-demand platforms, according to The New York Times.
- Nontraditional options for advertisers on those properties include the opportunity to be the sole sponsor of a show with a single 60-second spot at the beginning of programming so the viewer can go commercial-free for the duration of a show.
- Fox also presented a system advertisers can use to measure the effectiveness of ads served on online properties that can be applied hours later with the version of the ad that runs on linear TV.
Dive Insight:
Fox’s announcements were part of a broader theme at the upfronts presentations around the impact of digital on traditional TV marketing. Networks joked about the digital challenge in presentations, but also have come to understand the basic underpinning of the traditional TV advertising model has changed, per the Times.
Digital as an advertising category is expected to surpass linear TV in total spending this year, and what might be even more worrying for traditional TV media groups is that one of the fastest growing digital ad categories is video. The trend has become strong enough that some marketers are no longer separating linear TV from digital video and instead simply considering video ad budgets as encompassing all types of video ads from linear TV to seconds-long social media spots. And all this is happening while TV ratings continue to fall and marketers are looking for better deals for linear TV spending.
Fox has been at the forefront of traditional broadcasters when it comes to addressing the shifting advertising landscape, including the recent news that Fox Networks Group, which is 21st Century Fox's primary operating unit for TV and cable, is launching an in-house integrated marketing agency called All City. The company is also focused on enhancing measurement for digital video.