Ahead of this year’s upfronts, Fox Advertising has united its disparate vertical brands – Fox Sports, Fox News, Fox Entertainment, Tubi and Fox One – under one united brand umbrella. 

The initiative began as a top‑down priority from Jeff Collins, president, advertising sales, marketing and brand partnerships, Fox Corporation, to better present the scale, efficiency and performance of the Fox portfolio to the advertising community. The project was led by Puja Vohra, chief marketing officer, Fox Corp., advertising sales, who reports to Collins, in collaboration with Bo Bishop, executive director, creative strategy, Sibling Rivalry, along with plenty of support from their respective teams.

From the beginning, Fox engaged Sibling Rivalry to approach Fox Advertising not as a narrow business-to-business (B2B) asset, but as a brand that needs to meet the standards of the world’s most recognizable consumer names. The audience for this work includes marketers, creatives and media decision‑makers who are themselves brand stewards. The ambition was to create something that would feel at home in any major global city or cultural context.

 “Our clients are consumers first, and incredibly savvy ones,” said Vohra. “You don’t suddenly switch on a ‘B2B brain’ when you look at brand communications. We wanted Fox Advertising to feel like a brand you’d be excited to see on the streets of New York, in your social feed or at a major cultural event.”

As is usually the case with brand campaigns, the project began with deep research into how the brands are perceived, both by fans and by the industry. The key word that emerged from that research was “passion,” said Vohra, who joined Fox Corp. about nine months ago. 

“We’ve got incredibly large linear audiences, including Tubi, [the audience for which] is cord cutters and cord nevers. Some 98% of our linear impressions are what we call real-time reach, which is live or live plus same day. We know that live means engaged,” Vohra said. “It’s so powerful to talk about what levels of engagement, what levels of passion, we have across sports, news, entertainment and Tubi. This is what we own in the marketplace.” 

“What unifies all the different verticals at Fox, we discovered in talking to stakeholders, is that each vertical super-serves a hyper-passionate fandom who are very actively involved in what they love,” Bishop said. “Fox is good at creating these catalyzing moments for passion and fandom at different levels.”

Bishop used that research to craft the tagline, “Turn Passion into Performance,” which organically led into sub-taglines, such as “Turn Moments Into Momentum,” “Turn Engagement Into Action,” “Turn Impact Into Influence” and “Turn Reach Into Results.” The team of taglines specifically work for Fox Advertising because each phrase touches on keywords – such as performance, impact and reach – that have precise meanings for brand marketers, who are looking to achieve specific outcomes with targeted advertising campaigns. 

Once Vohra and Bishop settled on the brand campaign’s key components, they needed to make sure that the rest of Fox’s leadership was bought in across all of the verticals. 

“The portfolio brand is an umbrella brand across the verticals, each of which has their own marketing folks, their own CEOs and CMOs,” Vohra said. That meant that not only did Vohra and Bishop have to serve as creative strategists but also as diplomats and salespeople, making sure that all key decision-makers across all of the verticals were on board with their vision. 

“We really took it down to the brass tacks to work collaboratively with all of the divisions, Vohra said. “We met with a lot of different stakeholders across the company – marketing, strategy, sales, creative, programming – and thought about the throughline that we could thread across all of these verticals. At every step of the way, we had their buy-in.”

Once they had that, the team went to work on the look and feel of the campaign. Fox’s overall brand color is dark blue, while its verticals include other key colors, such as Tubi’s deep violet and Fox News’ red and white accents. While a variety of blues serve as the anchor colors for Fox Advertising’s new look, many complementary colors – such as white, light yellow, salmon, dark pink and cyan – show up along the way. Sibling Rivalry kept the font straightforward and sans serif, and for the most part, let the video clips tell the stories of each vertical.

“We developed a color and compositional language for Fox Advertising that feels elevated and inviting, distinct from traditional B2B branding yet fully aligned with the broader Fox universe,” said George Prah, design director at Sibling Rivalry, in a statement.

“We could have gone all blue but it wouldn’t have had the same sense of fun,” Vohra said. “This color palette is so sophisticated and it offers so much to work with.”

Beyond the color palette, Sibling Rivalry incorporated motion design, typography, pattern work and layout principles in order to allow the work to scale fluidly wherever it is needed, whether that’s animating across an upfront stage, living in a trade campaign, or appearing in the details of an email signature.

Now that the work is complete, each of the verticals is using it to produce their own campaigns. For example, Tubi used the tagline, “Tubi Turns Passion Into Performance” ahead of its Newfront presentation in March. It will also serve as the foundation for Fox Advertising’s upfront on Monday, May 11, in New  York City, as well as be woven throughout external communications, trade campaigns and client experiences. Lucas P. Aragón, senior vice president creative, Fox Advertising, is leading the ongoing rollout from the Fox Advertising side, working closely with Sibling Rivalry in an advisory capacity. 

Said Bishop: “Fox has been using this for a while now and they still love it. It’s something that feels strong and stable and very Fox.”