There is a certain poetic convenience in the idea that emotions, which used to require effort to produce, can now be summoned on demand from a content library organized by mood.

Tubi, the free advertising-supported streaming service owned by the Fox Corporation, is placing that wager with its new global brand campaign, "Find Any Feeling For Free," which the company describes as its largest effort to date, at least by volume of creative assets. The campaign was developed with Mischief @ No Fixed Address, the creative agency that has served as Tubi's agency of record and that has made something of a specialty out of work that leans into the absurd.

The insight driving the campaign, according to the company, is that people will go to considerable lengths to feel something — and that if the world fails to provide the necessary stimulus, a streaming service with a sufficiently large library can step in. (What, you were expecting the ads to say, "Against feelings"?)

The timing is notable. The so-called FAST category — free, advertising-supported streaming television, for those keeping acronym scorecards — has become increasingly crowded, with Tubi competing against Pluto TV, Amazon's Freevee, the Roku Channel, and a growing list of others, all of them fighting for the attention of viewers who have decided that paying for seventeen streaming subscriptions may not be sustainable.

In that environment, differentiation becomes difficult. Most FAST services offer roughly similar libraries of library titles, older movies, and reality programming that seems to multiply in the night. Tubi's solution, apparently, is to make the brand about emotional utility rather than content bragging — a pivot from "we have things to watch" to "we know how you want to feel."

Whether that distinction proves durable remains to be seen. But as positioning goes, it has a certain logic. After all, the remote control has always been an emotional instrument, even if we pretended otherwise.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Why Tubi’s New Global Campaign 'Feels' About Right"