In an industry long known for counting the number of people who watch TV shows and the commercials that accompany them, Fox is starting to place new emphasis on a different sort of tabulation.
The company on Thursday unveiled its Fox Flash Impact Report, which presents data evaluating how commercials perform, not just how many people might have seen them. The new report looks at such things as whether commercials made consumers more aware of what was being promoted, whether the ads changed the amount of consideration consumers give to making a purchase, how much they kept viewer engaged, and other “outcomes” that might include everything from making a visit to a car showroom to surfing an advertiser’s website to requesting information like a coupon or brochure.
“We know the value of premium content. And we know how well our content drives performance,” says Kym Frank, senior vice president of ad sales research for Fox Corp., during a recent interview. “So if all we’re doing is having conversations around age and sex, we’re not maximizing the value of our own portfolio. I think in the future we need to start really leaning in on how well we perform from an outcomes perspective versus just measuring impressions.”
Fox unveils the report days ahead of the start of the industry’s annual “upfront” market, when TV companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming. Fox is scheduled to make a presentation to advertisers on Monday.
Trying to link ads to consumer outcomes has been a quest that has occupied many on Madison Avenue for years. But in the age of streaming, where video subscribers can actively interact with the content they see on screen, there is more pressure from advertisers to pay more serious attention to such elements.
“The volume around the conversation around outcomes is swelling,” says Frank.
Others, including AMC Global Media., Paramount Skydance and A+E Global Media, have made similar offers in the past.
Fox’s research, which makes use of data from more than 20 different sources including YouGov, Marketcast and EDO, provides evidence that ads from a range of different advertiser categories perform well after airing on the company’s TV properties.
Ad campaigns from quick-service restaurants drove foot traffic higher by as much as 81% among viewers who saw as for the eateries on Fox, compared with audiences who did not. Ads for financial-services firms shown on Fox drove 13% higher search engagement, according to Fox’s data. And an analysis of online engagement shows that it would take five 30-second ads on competitive broadcast and cable networks to generate the same level of engagement as a single ad on Fox.
The challenge, of course, is that Fox is the source of the encouraging data about how ads perform on Fox. For outcomes to be taken more seriously by the industry, a third-party arbiter would likely have to take control of many of the measures of outcomes – or individual advertisers will have to work with a media company to design a framework around measuring goals.
“We’re all trying to make our own way. But in the future, we kind of have to all do this together. We can’t have measurement in a vacuum. That is not a currency,” says Frank. “If outcomes becomes the currency, we have to kind of all row in the same direction.”