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Fox turns to old-fashioned road show to drum up ad sales

Fox Sports President Eric Shanks was standing off to the side of a gala dinner in a Los Angeles ballroom on April 14, looking down at his watch.

Shanks’ colleague, National Networks President Jamie Horowitz, was being honored at SportsBusiness Journal/Daily’s Forty Under 40 dinner at the L.A. Live complex.

Shortly after Horowitz’s name was announced and he had left the stage, the two and Pete Vlastelica, executive vice president of digital, slipped out of the ballroom, drove to an airport and boarded a flight to Dallas, where the next day they would give a sales presentation to ad sales clients in the country’s fifth-biggest market.

With the upfront selling season only a few weeks away, Fox Sports executives felt like they needed to use a different approach this year to tout its sports properties, which includes TV’s biggest annual ad sales day with next year’s Super Bowl. Rather than hosting its own upfront presentation in New York, as ESPN has done for the past 10 years, Fox Sports executives scheduled an old-fashioned road show, bringing their executives and on-air talent to six important markets — far away from Madison Avenue — so they could hammer home their message.

On the morning of April 14, Fox executives started the road show in Seattle. A few days following the April 15 event in Dallas, a group of Fox executives — including Toby Byrne, ad sales president; Neil Mulcahy, sports sales executive vice president; and Sarah Tourville, senior vice president of sports brand activation — traveled to San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta.

The message was always the same: Over the next four years, Fox will be home to some of the biggest sporting events, including two Super Bowls (LI and LIV), the men’s World Cup in 2018 and the Women’s World Cup in 2019.

In each meeting, Shanks highlighted the fact that Fox was about to embark on a run to crown 10 champions over the

Fox Sports will help crown 10 champions over the next 12 months, including the World Series.
Photo by: Getty Images
next 12 months — from the Super Bowl and World Series to the Big East Conference and Copa America. With big events like the Daytona 500 and U.S. Open golf on its schedule, Fox wanted to build ad buyers’ excitement around their sports properties.

Fox kept the events relatively small, attracting between 20 and 40 ad buyers in each market for a breakfast, lunch or dinner. The network hosted 15-minute panels, some moderated by college analyst Joel Klatt, with panels of three to six people who usually had roots in the local market.

Fox used some of its big-name talent, like soccer analyst Alexi Lalas, football reporter Jay Glazer and on-air host Colin Cowherd, all of whom attended events in several of the markets. New baseball analyst John Smoltz attended the Atlanta event; NFL analyst Howie Long was in Seattle; baseball analyst Frank Thomas was in Chicago; and the UFC’s Dana White and Ronda Rousey were in San Francisco.

Byrne described the meetings as intimate, places where you could see ad buyers who may not have made it to New York for a regular upfront presentation.

Byrne said that Fox has not decided whether to set up another road show next year. Ad sales from this year’s events probably will dictate that. He said he will know in 60 to 90 days if Fox’s road show was successful in building momentum for the sports group’s ad sales push.

The Final Countdown

Brands advertising during sports programming (April 25, 2015-April 24, 2016)
According to iSpot.tv, 2.19 percent of all the money spent by brands on television and digital advertising during sports programming from April 25, 2015, through April 24, 2016, was made by Geico, the most of any brand. The insurance company’s “Countdown: It’s What You Do” spot aired across those platforms a total of 2,668 times during that span, the most of any spot. iSpotv also measures the online chatter for each brand’s actual TV spots, called the digital share of voice. For example, Verizon’s “A Better Network as Explained by Colorful Balls” spot aired 1,569 times and accounted for 19.31 percent of the total digital response that brand’s ads generated over the past year.

 
Brand Airings Spend share of voice Digital share of voice Spot that aired the most (No. of airings) Spend share of voice Digital share of voice
Geico 42,122 2.19% 3.18% Countdown: It’s What You Do (2,668) 10.99% 12.24%
AT&T 18,303 1.71% 2.86% Oops (150) 8.70% 2.56%
Ford 8,284 1.61% 0.55% Military Grade (405) 13.12% 9.22%
Verizon 12,132 1.52% 0.66% A Better Network as Explained by Colorful Balls (1,569) 21.30% 19.31%
Chevrolet 11,307 1.39% 0.30% The Car You Never Expected (391) 13.69% 13.53%
Samsung Mobile 10,070 1.31% 2.00% It’s Not a Phone, It’s a Galaxy: Camera (380) 12.03% 11.24%
Toyota 7,476 1.26% 0.67% Countdown (568) 12.13% 7.79%
Nissan 11,260 1.20% 1.23% Family Visit (422) 12.95% 8.42%
McDonald’s 9,720 1.13% 1.32% Mix & Match (686) 14.21% 8.47%
Subway 13,793 0.99% 0.37% Founders (531) 13.72% 5.78%

Source: iSpot.tv


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