Ross Appleton on Scaling Tubi in the U.K.

Ross Appleton, VP and general manager for the U.K. at Tubi, spoke at the Connected TV Festival today about driving usage and advertiser gains for the AVOD platform as it nears its first anniversary in the competitive British landscape.

Appleton joined the Fox Corporation-owned platform from ITV to build its U.K. presence. You can watch his keynote conversation with World Screen’s Mansha Daswani here.

“The U.K. is a competitive market, as are the other markets that Tubi operates in: the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand,” Appleton noted. “The free USP that works so well in the U.S. doesn’t resonate in quite the same way in the U.K. In the U.K., there’s a very strong free streaming offering, particularly from the BVOD services. Our take at Tubi is that streaming in the U.K. and most other markets is clustered around what we term the monoculture—they super-serve the median viewer with programming that’s designed to deliver mass audiences to single titles. These streamers do a great job of that. We see the U.K. as being a melting pot of different cultures and diverse audiences that we believe are missing out on the deeper content discovery that Tubi is able to offer them. We very much put the U.K. viewers first. We offer them a diverse set of content that allows them to delve into whatever fandoms or rabbit holes they want to.”

On the approach to curating the content slate, Appleton said the team is focused on “engagement—we’re not programming for subscriber acquisitions the way an SVOD service might be doing. The more viewer engagement we get, the more we can monetize that through advertising. So, one of the keys for us as we came into the market was knowing we were going to need to listen to our audience. That’s listening to the data that we’re seeing through our app or listening to some of the softer signals, whether it’s via social or in the old-fashioned way, speaking to our audience.”

The slate has been evolving since launch, with Appleton highlighting the principles he and his team have been keeping top of mind. The first is the breadth and depth of content, with Tubi already boasting the largest free slate in the market, he said. “What’s different with Tubi is giving a voice and a platform to some of those creators and that content that you wouldn’t find in other places. We’ve amassed this vast content library that allows us to serve different communities and fandoms.”

Further, “rather than trying to define what people should be viewing, we like to bubble up the culture of the market and reflect what people want to see.” The platform has also built up a stable of global originals that it is deploying in the U.K.

Appleton then discussed the pitch to advertisers in the U.K., including the premium, brand-safe nature of the platform, its significant usage on the living room set—more than 75 percent of viewing—broad distribution across CTV devices and an audience that marketers are eager to reach. “We have audiences at Tubi that are difficult to find elsewhere,” Appleton said. “Our audience skews younger, and we have a lot more incrementality than linear viewing. From an advertiser perspective, we’re able to augment and increase your reach versus some of the baseline audiences that you’re getting elsewhere.”

Plus, Appleton added, Tubi audiences are engaged, with the platform home to “some of the lowest ad loads in the industry,” he said. “That’s great for viewers, but it’s also great for advertisers. When [viewers] are watching adverts and not watching too many of them, they’re engaged with the adverts that they are seeing. There’s more impact and attention to those adverts.”

The CTV advertising opportunity will continue to expand, Appleton said, economic headwinds notwithstanding. “It will be an increasingly important part of advertisers’ and agencies’ plans. It will continue to grow, particularly in those harder-to-reach demographics that maybe don’t plug the aerial into their TV. And as more people shed their aerials and upgrade to connected TVs, we’ll see the CTV viewing growing, the CTV audience growth, and therefore, from an advertiser perspective, I expect to see that to continue to grow in the aggregate. There may be some bumps along the road within the markets, but that would be typical of many industries, not just ours.”

Appleton then discussed the various ways Tubi has been looking to raise its profile in the U.K., where its competitors include the BVOD offshoots of well-established brands like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

“Many people’s first exposure to Tubi in the first few months in the U.K. has been finding a piece of content that they love that maybe was promoted to them on their TV operating system or their Amazon Fire stick, watching it on Tubi, being delighted by the experience and then hopefully coming back for more. That’s the best marketing that you can do.”

There have also been brand-building efforts like CTV advertising campaigns, as well as social media and creator content marketing initiatives. “It’s not a cookie-cutter approach where we’ll just take the marketing and brand assets from the U.S. and play them out here,” Appleton stressed. “We’ll do it in our own way. Core to our brand positioning is not taking ourselves too seriously, providing viewers with the content in a non-judgmental way. Our strap line in the U.K. says, ‘allowing viewers to watch what they actually want to watch.’”

Appleton came to Tubi after being part of the launch team at ITVX, the British commercial broadcaster’s streaming platform. “Ultimately, whether it’s ITV or Tubi, you need to focus on viewer engagement. Viewer engagement is core to what we do at Tubi. It is in the DNA of the company. If you get the viewer engagement right by serving the right content and delighting in the right way and relentlessly focusing on it, engaged viewers equal happy advertisers on the other side of our business. It’s one of the main learnings from being in this industry. If you get viewer engagement right, then you’re onto a winner.”