Fox Corp. has tapped Innovid to measure audience viewership across its media portfolio, including free ad-supported streaming TV service Tubi.
Specifically, Fox will be using the Innovid XP cross-platform measurement tool, which incorporates household-level data from smart TVs, automatic content recognition (ACR) and connected TV ad impressions. This will generate a deduplicated audience view on Fox’s news, sports and entertainment networks, as well as the ad-supported Tubi service.
Dan Callahan, SVP of Data Strategy & Sales Innovation at Fox, in a statement highlighted the need for data as part of a converged TV strategy.
“As more viewers engage with content across multiple screens, it remains vital that we continue to work with our ad partners and provide them with the necessary data and insights that further display the value of converged TV and the engaged audiences and concentrated impact Fox delivers,” Callahan stated.
The partnership, he continued, marks another move to align measurement data more closely with advertisers’ goals. Innovid’s platform will also provide real-time information to help advertisers manage in-flight campaign efficiency and effectiveness, ad frequency and help inform optimizations for media and creative.
The companies noted that the new deal expands on a partnership that Innovid and Tubi struck up in 2021. Part of the aim in tapping Innovid is to help Fox enable advertisers to glean additional understanding of incremental audience reach across both linear and streaming campaigns.
“For more than a year, Tubi has been working in lockstep with Innovid to quantify the unique reach that streaming delivers to advertisers beyond linear – providing Top TV advertisers with actionable insights,” said Tyler Fitch, SVP of Advanced TV & Partnerships at Tubi, in a statement. “Tubi and Fox have a shared vision to create the optimal environment for advertisers to efficiently reach the right audiences across multiple platforms and screens. InnovidXP brings this vision to life with consistent, accurate and scalable cross-platform TV measurement.”
The announcement pointed to results from recent analysis of converged TV campaigns using InnovidXP as speaking to how the combination of Fox’s linear networks and Tubi will allow advertisers to scale audiences across content platforms. The results showed that, on average, eight out of 10 households using Tubi aren’t reachable on linear, and brands who add Tubi to a Fox linear campaign can reach incremental audiences at an average of 75+%. Innovid said this shows the value of Tubi Unique Content Categories in growing that incremental reach with genre environments that are contextually relevant and transparent.
Tubi for its part has been building up content on the FAST platform, just this week hitting the 200 channel mark for its live linear lineup.
Innovid debuted the InnovidXP cross-platform measurement product in June, boasting impressions data tied to around 95 million U.S. households and person-level data across all 210 North American designated market areas (DMAs). The product launch followed Innovid’s acquisition of video ad measurement and attribution platform TVSquared a few months earlier, in a $160 million deal.
The deal between Fox and Innovid comes as the TV industry and advertisers are exploring new forms of measurement, alongside growing consumption of video on streaming and CTV, that go beyond traditional metrics provided by the likes of Nielsen – which had come under scrutiny related to concerns about accuracy.
Fox last month enlisted Comscore to help target local TV ads, as it added the company’s advertising currency for its owned and operated TV stations.
Also in September, Conviva and iSpot (the latter one of the players in the emerging audience measurement space) teamed up to integrate respective data into a unified cross-platform ratings product for currency that measures ads and programming together across broadcast, cable and streaming apps. NBCUniversal is one of the companies that will be utilizing the combined data, having tapped iSpot earlier this year for ad measurement and currency tests – as well as activating the vendor’s cross-platform audiences as its official currency for national ad buys at the 2022 Upfront.