Fox Corp. has slimmed down since it sold the bulk of its cable and studio assets to Walt Disney Co. in 2019, but its new head of ad sales is eager to take on bigger rivals.
Fox arrives at the start of the industry’s annual “upfront” market with the 2025 Super Bowl broadcast and football great Tom Brady among its offerings. Brady is expected to begin a much-anticipated stint as an announcer for Fox’s NFL season in the fall, and Fox is already “engaged” in talks for Super Bowl advertising, says Jeff Collins, who was named president of advertising sales in January of this year, replacing veteran Marianne Gambelli.
He doesn’t think a media company has to be a giant to win in the current market.
“A lot of the competitive set over the course of the last four or five years has looked to get bigger at all costs,” he says during an interview, alluding to a series of mergers and acquisitions across the sector, such as the combination of Discovery and Warner or Amazon’s purchase of MGM. Fox, he says, “has a very different story, focusing on where we can be best in class.”
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Collins has supervised ad sales at Fox News Media for the past few years, and gained traction by encouraging sponsors to test out new concepts and categories, including a broader array of lifestyle programming. Fox News has been adding more of that content to its offering as more mainstream advertisers grow wary of single-host opinion programming amid a polarizing era for the U.S. consumer
Collins continues to face a complex marketplace. In 2024, Netflix and Amazon are competing directly for the very ad dollars that once went directly to traditional linear TV. Amazon’s decision to launch an ad-supported version of Prime Video in 2024 threatens to add a deluge of new inventory to the mix — one media buyers believe could result in a weakening of pricing across the market.
Fox, says Collins, intends to push back on such pressures. The company can offer sizable audiences via its broadcast network, sports portfolio, Fox News viewership or its Tubi streaming hub, and notes that the crowd for each asset is different than the others.
The portfolio is “desirable for advertisers because the audiences are incredibly complementary. The cord-cutting audience on Tubi is very different than the Fox News live audience, which is different than the family viewing and multicultural viewing of Fox Entertainment, which is different from fans of sports,” he notes.
Unlike some larger rivals, he says, Fox does not push broader ad packages across the portfolio, but stands ready to help those who do want to test such concepts. “You really get incremental reach” across Fox media assets, he says, because each outlet’s viewership is distinct.
He expects Super Bowl LIX, slated for broadcast from New Orleans on February 9, 2025, to help Fox gain dollars “across all major categories, even auto and tech and finance, where they have been a little bit soft for the past year.” CBS’ 2024 broadcast of the Big Game set new viewership records, and “there is a lot of momentum,” Collins says, adding that “we have never received the Super Bowl in this good of a shape before.”
He declined to specify the price Fox was seeking for a 30-second ad in the event. CBS sought between $6.5 million and $7 million for such inventory in this year’s game. The new record audience and recent demand could spur Fox to test going well over $7.5 million.