Media Planners are a niche audience, so we knew we needed to find a place that provided massive reach along their journey. What better place than the place they go to in order to kick off planning - the NewFronts and Upfronts media conventions. We leveraged OOH, digital, and activations on their way to the conference, hiding a sales pitch that spoke directly to them when it was most important for them to think of us right before they plan for the year.

Tubi is a relatively new streaming service in the USA competing with established providers. As a challenger brand, brand awareness was not as high as our competitors like Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+. Timing of this campaign was important, as it ran during the NewFronts and Upfronts conferences, when media companies compete for the attention of Media Buyers and media space is planned for the year.

Tubi is a free streaming service that makes money from advertisers only. Our brief was to raise awareness of the Tubi brand and be top of mind to Media Buyers during the annual Upfronts and NewFonts media conventions, when media buys are planned for the year. The reason being, Media Buyers can dictate which channels are worth investing media dollars into, as one of their primary goals is to find unique audiences to advertise to. On the backdrop of a more competitive landscape than ever before, Tubi needed to find a way to convince Media Buyers that we had a truly unique audience, without being an official sponsor of the conventions themselves. If successful, our main objective was to to increase revenue with a target KPI of 10% increase in media growth.

Our creative was to inform media buyers that with over 50,000 titles, Tubi’s niche content has something for everyone, even them. To do this, we created a niche film series for media buyers, starring media buyers. “The Call To Action” consisted of 3 separate, 5-minute genre films, filled with audience insights. “Under the impression” was a crime drama interrogation where a media buyer was questioned for placing the wrong creative. “Request for Proposal” was a romantic comedy starring a media buyer who developed a campaign to get her boyfriend to propose. “The Gen Z Next Door” was a thriller featuring a media buyer who would do anything to learn audience insights. The films themselves were crafted with excellence, created by up-and-coming independent filmmakers, with the goal of making real films full of action, suspense, and drama that would be worthy of an independent film festival.

By purposefully avoiding the mainstream, mass audience approach, Tubi houses almost every unique audience. It was the brand insight that gave Tubi the power of differentiation: Tubi isn’tfor

one audience, it has content that engages EVERY unique audience, even media buyers. The campaign proved how Tubi’s content offering was so niche, that it would have something unique for all audiences. The product, “The Call to Action: A Film Series for Marketers,” was a Trojan Horse — a B2B campaign that felt like a B2C campaign for media buyers. We knew they’d be bombarded by graphs, statistics and figures, at NewFronts, so we made something that would truly attract their attention — new content starring…them.

Just like any other Tubi original content, the series was treated like a cinematic launch – complete with digital trailers, billboards, wild postings, truck wraps, taxi toppers, digital boards, and subway advertising canvassing the areas where Upfronts and NewFronts events were happening. Whether at the Fulton Street subway station, on the streets around the World Trade Center you couldn’t miss us. We also took over media buyer’s online world, with targeted ads across social, SEO, and banners on the websites our audience frequents. By honing in on our audience through demographic targeting and keyword usage, we shared our film trailers across Meta, LinkedIn and Twitter. And took over trade publications like Adage and Adweek over the week of NewFronts.

The campaign produced some groundbreaking results for the brand, like $230M in revenue in Q2: an unprecedented quarterly increase of 15%. The New York City takeover & trade-press takeover had 1.33B impressions during the campaign period. The films had 10.3M total views, generating over 100,000 clicks. And they produced Record High KPIs from Q4 ‘22 to Q2 ‘23: increasing brand familiarity from 66% to 72%, and brand momentum from 21% to 33%.

Overall familiarity and perceived brand momentum are critical influencers for media-buyers as they structure plans and buys. Yet, media buyers' familiarity with Tubi had only moved 3pts in the previous 18 months (64-66%) in 2022. And brand momentum was in a sharp state of decline. Dropping almost 10pts in two years, and now sitting at 21%. Based on this data, we needed to urgently stop our declining momentum and improve familiarity to prove that media buyers believed in us. Paired with the data from a WHM study, 48% of customers found B2B advertising boring. Our solution: create consumer creative advertising hidden as B2B advertising. The impact showed a remarkable power shift in the landscape, professional Tubi platform usage increased by 10pts by the end of July 2023, doubling our expectations and setting a Tubi record high of 43%.