Foxtel Media Announces Slew Of FOXTEST Agency Partners

Foxtel Media has today announced several new FOXTEST partners and a debut of testing following significant interest in the advertising experimentation platform. IPG, OMD, Spark Foundry, GroupM and several independents have come on board as agency partners.

Testing has commenced with sport and entertainment research authority, Gemba and with TV performance management platform, Adgile, to help co-create the future of marketing and explore innovation across video advertising.

Announced at Foxtel Media’s 2021 Showcase event, FOXTEST is a $3 million initiative that helps brands explore the frontiers of advertising, and run experiments across advertising content, experience, and data.

• Content (impact of context, assessing inventory on engagement, re-evaluating standard media metrics)

• Ad experience (impact of lower ad loads on advertising performance, the co-creation of new ad formats or tactics to enhance to command more attention)

• Data (third party data ingestion and segmentation, deeper consumer insight, sales attribution)

Under the FOXTEST banner, Foxtel Media commissioned Gemba to conduct a three-phase research project to understand the female sporting audience and demonstrate the true value of this platform for brands, partners, and sponsors.

In collaboration with a number of partners, including NAB, Harvey Norman and Suncorp, Foxtel Media will seek to define the drivers of engagement across Women’s Sports, and how these build trust, resonance and ultimately lead to great outcomes for brands.

Gemba’s head of dtrategy, Andrew Goodieson said “We are completely on board with Foxtel Media about going deeper in our understanding of the barriers and opportunities for brands to invest more into Women Sport. We are confident that this research will provide a playbook to inspire and help brands realise the full potential of the women codes across the country.”

Westpac, and its media agency Spark Foundry, was announced as one of FOXTEST’s first partners late last year, with a focus on defining the role of context and engagement in optimising brand and retail messages. Spark Foundry Client Director, Vanessa Akem says, “We believe attention is a significant metric, and we’re investing early in quantifying the contribution of engagement and context. Westpac is the perfect client to help us to trial new methodologies, with tests like this allowing our teams to apply the most contemporary thinking in an increasingly competitive market.”

Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain (main photo) said that the strong interest and positive reception from the market has not surprised him, “The initiative premiered to broad industry appeal, with many key players showing great appetite for the move away from the traditional ad-buying model. Over the last 12 months we have actively listened to our agency partners and clients – they want to collaborate to define new ways of working and challenge the existing advertising conventions, formats and experiences for brands.”

“Since announcing FOXTEST we have been in close consultation and engagement with agencies and clients from across the industry. We are already making great progress in establishing tests, specifically across data integration, creating new ad formats and further understanding the application of attention metrics across our channels.”

Managing director of MAGNA Global, Nick Durrant said: “IPG has already commenced work on a number of tests that seek to better understand how we can plan and buy more engaged and higher value audiences across Foxtel platforms. Ultimately you need to start somewhere, and by carving out some budget, and partnering with our clients, we can begin to test and define new ways of buying that go beyond blunt CPMs and start to leverage the deep insights of Foxtel’s valuable subscribers.”

Marelle Salib, national head of investment at OMD added: “The team at OMD are doubling down in defining the future of our data capabilities with Foxtel, and we are pleased to confirm that McDonald’s will be one of the founding partners of FOXTEST. We are excited to further understand and unleash the greater targeting opportunities that sit across Foxtel’s streaming platforms and extend this testing mindset across the OMD client base.”

The charge for defining new ad formats and models across Foxtel platforms will be led by GroupM, with Seb Rennie Chief investment officer, echoing the positive market sentiment behind the experimentation. “In our capacity as an agency partner, and a key customer, GroupM plays a key strategic role in exploring new ad formats that continue to evolve and improve the customer experience. We will apply this lens as the capabilities evolve across Foxtel’s streaming platforms and we seek new opportunities to make advertising better for people. We are excited to facilitate these trials across our client base and look forward to building out these new opportunities with the Foxtel Media team”.

Foxtel Media has also commenced a partnership with Adgile Media to close the loop on buying activity across Foxtel’s streaming platforms.

Craig Service, Adgile’s chief customer officer, calls out some very positive insights gleaned from the trials to date, “We have applied Adgile’s Intelligent Content Recognition (ICR) technology across a number of retail campaigns on Foxtel streaming platforms and the results are significant. Advertisers can see the direct flow of sales and web traffic from campaigns, and to date we have seen a 3 times greater return on investment on campaigns across Kayo. We continue to work with Foxtel Media to establish further benchmarks on performance and outcomes across a broad range of categories on their streaming platforms.”