Fox Advertising recently launched a new brand platform and visual identity that unites its verticals — Fox Sports, Fox News, Fox Entertainment, Tubi and streaming platform Fox One — into one portfolio with the tagline “Turn Passion into Performance.” Created in partnership with agency Sibling Rivalry, the work seeks to better position the Fox Advertising brand amid a fragmented, fluctuating media landscape and ahead of Fox’s upfront presentation to advertisers on May 11.
“Fox Advertising has the purview of some very strong verticals. Our verticals are the best in the business, usually number one in each of their categories,” said Puja Vohra, CMO and executive vice president of advertising sales at Fox. “The cohesive narrative that brings all of these under one umbrella [was] probably not at the same level as the strength of our brands. One really important goal…has been how we show up in the marketplace against our competitive set when we talk about ourselves as a portfolio.”
Along with a tagline that unites fandoms with outcomes, Sibling Rivalry’s work with Fox centered on creating a visual system that feels premium and contemporary and emphasizes energy, movement and emotion rather than technology and data. A color palette described as modern and optimistic joins motion design, typography, pattern work and other elements that scale fluidly regardless of medium, per press materials.
“[Fox] is never about doing things that are safe, milquetoast, comfortable or straight down the middle. It's always something that's different and compelling, and there's a big swing in everything that they do,” said Bo Bishop, executive director for creative strategy at Sibling Rivalry. “How can we make something that lives alongside this legacy of confident, bold, compelling, energetic entertainment and content?”
The new positioning will be the foundation for Fox Advertising’s upfront presentation, and will show up across trade and B2B marketing, sales materials, digital channels and client communications. While each vertical has its own tone, feel and vibe, the portfolio brand brings them together.
“We couldn't just create a bland holding company for this stuff to live under. It had to have its own personality and energy, but also have the ability to lift up the verticals, to unite them all and to not step on them,” Bishop added.
A portfolio for advertisers
Before setting out to rebrand Fox Advertising, Sibling Rivalry dug into why the brand exists, what makes it special and what it promises to the world. It soon identified a potential shift in the brand’s competitive shift that favored speaking about the engagement of Fox’s audiences, rather than the technologies and tools that speak to brand marketer and advertiser needs.
“The behavior is ultra passionate, ultra engaged fandoms, that when you link them all together, it gives advertisers this amazing access to these audiences at scale,” Bishop said of Fox’s audience.
That passion — the word “fandom” seemed overused to the Fox team — is present, whether a viewer is a Fox News loyalist, a Gordon Ramsay fan or a Fox Sports obsessive. Engaged viewers are the ones watching content, sharing it online and acting on advertising messages. The ability to deliver those outcomes is the top need of advertisers, per Fox’s research, as is a portfolio that is built on a foundation of news, sports and entertainment.
“There's not a lot of waste. We don't have the bulk and the bloat of many of our media competitors,” Vohra said. “The company has made several strategic choices over the years that have made us this lean, mean fighting machine, and we truly can deliver for advertisers in a way that we believe our competitive set cannot.”
The Fox machine certainly delivers: Fox News is a cable network that operates at the level of a broadcast network, with a 46% share of all news impressions, Vohra said. Fox Sports has been number one in live sports viewing for six of the last seven years, and has a summer schedule dominated by World Cup coverage. On streaming, Tubi has more than 100 million active users and achieved its first quarter of profitability last year.
With its brand refresh, Fox Advertising is prepared for its upfront presentation, which will come between those by legacy media companies and more recent entrants like Netflix and Amazon. Vohra, who joined Fox last June after stints at Paramount, NBCUniversal and Warner Media, was drawn to the prescience of how Fox — which was formed in 2019 after Disney acquired 21st Century Fox — has approached the market.
“There's a lot of talk now about live sports or streaming or ad-supported streaming. Fox was built with that from the ground up. That is not news to us. It's not the flavor of the month,” Vohra said. “Fox has always deliberately built the portfolio around putting the needs of the advertiser first.”
