Fox, Madhive Team Up to Bring More Live Streaming Sports to Local Advertisers
'What Madhive does really well is they grab as many points of distribution that are in the OTT world as possible, and then put it into a package for us,' says Fox TV Stations' Michael Page
With more live sports available via streaming, local advertisers are looking to get into the game.
Fox has as much sports as anyone this side of ESPN, especially at this time of year, with the NFL, college football and the World Series dominating the fourth quarter. Between its new Fox One direct-to-consumer product, virtual MVPDs, the Fox Sports app and numerous other outlets, a lot of viewers can stream games shown on broadcast or cable.
Fox Television Stations is working with ad-tech company Madhive to gather those eyeballs for local advertisers who understand that sponsoring live sports can be the foundation of a powerful campaign.
Madhive and the Fox Stations have already been working together, with Madhive helping to build Fox Local Extension (FLX), Fox’s CTV product that gives local advertisers greater reach through online video and targets audiences with precision down to the ZIP code level.
“What Madhive does really well is they grab as many points of distribution that are in the OTT world as possible, and then put it into a package for us that allows us maximum reach in the geographic areas that we sell,” Michael Page, senior VP of digital sales for Fox Television stations, told The Measure.
Fox’s local sports inventory expands Mandhive’s Local Live Sport Marketplace. Madhive also partners with Disney/ESPN to provide advertisers with access to inventory in premium live programming including College Gameday, Monday Night Football and NHL, MLB and NCAA games.
Working with Madhive ensures that Fox’s local advertisers will get inventory in programming that is actually live and fraud free, said Page.
“The migration to streaming is so heavy in sports that there's a lot of people trying to be opportunistic,” he said, which means advertisers have to be vigilant to make sure that what they’re buying is really live sports.
Madhive enhances its sports offering by integrating its Maverick AI, which uses content signals and behavioral learnings to reach and engage sports fans. Maverick also provides predictive audience targeting, cross channel planning and real-time optimization.
Among the broad swath of sports fans, Madhive can target more specific audiences that will yield high conversion rates for advertisers, said Jim Wilson, president of Madihive.
“After years of campaigns, machine learning and AI, we have fairly good predictive analytics prior to a campaign launch, which works out well for our clients,” he said.
Madhave’s data marketplace has a large number of providers that help target campaigns.
The AI often finds unexpected audience groups likely to engage with the advertisers message.
“We're often surprised at the audiences that we find that convert well for the client, whether that’s a footfall, or a website visit, making the cash register ring or some other outcome,” Wilson said.
The jury is out on how different the audiences are for live sports on linear TV compared to those that stream live sports, he added.
Live sports viewers are extremely engaged with the programming, and that translates into stronger engagement with the commercial messages that appear during time outs, Page said. Some research has shown that the engagement is even higher when live sports are streamed, he added.
Fox will be broadcasting the World Cup next year and Fox TV Stations is working with Madhive to put together a pre-World Cup product for local advertisers looking to capitalize on the excitement over soccer.
Page said the packages Madhive helps the sales teams at its station assemble enable local advertisers to reach the elusive sports viewer not only on Saturday and Sunday when they’re watching games, but later in the week when they’re watching other channels including Fox’s Tubi.
“One of the most valuable parts of working with our partner at Madhive is their DSP knows how to deliver local better than any of the programmatic partners that are out there,” Page said. "Their ability to deliver granularity at a local level is hands down the best in the business and we've seen that for the last five and a half years across a large number of advertisers and both local and large national agencies that like to buy locally.”
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With the start of the school year and the return of football, broadcast and cable in August saw their first gains in TV usage since April, Nielsen said in its monthly report.
Broadcast viewership climbed 1.1% from July levels. College football generated the biggest numbers with Fox’s game between top-ranked Texas and defending national champion Ohio State drawing 16.6 million viewers.
Cable’s share of TV usage rose to 22.5% from 22.2% in July, showing particularly large gains among 18 to 49 year olds. Led by ESPN, cable sports viewing was up 30%.
Time spent streaming dropped 4% in August and streaming’s share fell to 46.4% from 47.3%.
Netflix’s share fell slightly, but it had the four most popular shows in streaming with Wednesday, KPop Demon Hunters, The Hunting Wives and Sullivan’s Crossing.
Overall time spent watching was down 2% in August compared to July.
