The technology industry has given the advertising business many things over the years — venture-funded competitors, a vocabulary heavy on disruption, and the occasional chief executive in a hoodie. Now it has contributed a management philosophy.
At its annual presentation to advertisers on Monday, Fox Corporation leaned on what its ad sales chief, Jeff Collins, called "first principles," a term popularized in Silicon Valley to describe the practice of stripping a problem down to its fundamental truths before rebuilding. In Fox's telling, those truths are live sports, live news, entertainment programming and ad-supported streaming — a portfolio that Mr. Collins characterized as deliberately streamlined in an era when competitors are chasing scale across every conceivable platform.
The presentation, held at the New York City Center in Manhattan, devoted considerable attention to the Men's World Cup, which begins next month with Fox holding the domestic broadcast rights. Mr. Collins told reporters last week that the vast majority of World Cup inventory had already been sold, making Monday's presentation something closer to a ceremonial lap than a sales call. (The United States last hosted the tournament in 1994, when the most sophisticated advertising technology involved buying a thirty-second spot and hoping someone was watching.)
The technology story Fox did choose to emphasize involved something called Fox Fan OS, which the company's chief technology officer, Melody Hildebrandt, described as an "agentic AI-native media operating system." The platform, Ms. Hildebrandt said, analyzes every second of Fox's video programming in real time, extracting data on topic, talent, mood and what she called "vibes."
Whether media buyers will find this differentiated from the artificial-intelligence initiatives announced by NBCUniversal and Disney in recent weeks, or will file it under the heading of table stakes, remained an open question as the lights came up.
Tubi, the free streaming service Fox acquired in 2020, received a prominent slot, with its chief executive, Anjali Sud, noting that the platform now reaches 100 million monthly active users. Tom Brady, Derek Jeter and Gordon Ramsay all made appearances, as did the cast of an upcoming "Baywatch" reboot — a programming decision that suggests some first principles are more enduring than others.
Original story published in Adweek: "At Fox's Upfront, the World Cup, Tubi, and AI Steal the Show"