Commentary

Tubi Takes On The Big Guys With Cheeky Urban Campaign

Getting a bit battle-fatigued from reading the nonstop predictions of carnage as the “streaming wars” ramp up?

Ad-supported streaming upstart Tubi is helping to lighten up the mood with a funny, saucy campaign in four major urban markets.

The AVOD is using billboards in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit to proudly call out its free-to-viewers model and tweak all-paid #1 streamer Netflix and hybrid paid/free Hulu.

“Dear Netflix, I had my first freesome last night. Tubi was amazing,” reads one out-of-home ad. Another confesses: “Dear Netflix, I didn’t think you’d find out. I streamed Tubi last night.”

Versions addressed to “Dear Hulu” state: “I was with Tubi last night, but I only watched,” and “You’re cool and all, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Tubi last night.”

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Another ad format uses each city’s name in the “Dear” greeting before asking: “You free tonight? Because we are.”

The in-house-created campaign — launched yesterday with an aerial stunt event in Los Angeles — will also employ digital connected TV, taxi TV, digital OOH, geo-fencing, digital home page takeovers and social.

It will run for between four and eight weeks, varying by location.

Tubi Vice President of Marketing Emily Jordan said the campaign is targeting consumers who are frustrated with the mounting costs of subscribing to multiple paid streaming services.

The message: You don’t have to be “platform monogamous” — you can complement paid subs with Tubi’s “absolutely free premium content.”

Tubi isn’t revealing how much it is spending on this campaign — its largest OOH effort to date — but confirmed that it’s planning more marketing in the months ahead.

The five-year-old, San Francisco-based service — which announced that it surpassed 20 million active monthly users and 94 million hours of content as of May — is looking to keep its momentum rolling.

Tubi says it spent “over nine figures” on content to build its current portfolio of more than 15,000 movies and TV series, totaling more than 44,000 hours.

The service is now offered through more than 200 content partners, including studios such as Warner Bros., NBCUniversal, MGM and Lionsgate, and was integrated into Comcast’s X1 platform in late 2018, and into the Cox Contour platform this April.

While its active monthly users now outnumber the approximately 16 million for competitive AVOD Pluto — now owned by giant Viacom — Tubi is, of course, dwarfed by Netflix (with about 60 million U.S. viewers and 140 million viewers worldwide).

Disney-controlled Hulu said it had about 28 million subscribers, 26.8 million of which are paid, as of May.

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