Tubi is not like the other streaming services.
The best way to describe the experience of Tubi is that it is like one of those large bins of DVDs at JB HiFi. That isn’t meant to sound dismissive or as a pejorative, but rather, as soon as you start looking through it you are going to find a wild and unexpected assortment of content.
Yes, you’ll find some well-known, beloved Hollywood movies and TV shows on the service. But you’re also going to find a lot of long-forgotten movies and shows in the library. Some will be great, nostalgia evoking finds, while others are, well… let’s politely call them jewels waiting to be discovered.
And audiences are finding their way to the personalised discovery that Tubi offers. Recently, the service reached 100 million monthly users across its global footprint.
Last week David Salmon was in Sydney to talk about the streaming service with local media buyers at News Australia’s All Screens event. Salmon is Tubi’s EVP & Managing Director, International, which, as he describes it, means that he looks after all of the Tubi territories that aren’t the United States.
On stage he talked about the eclectic range of titles available on Tubi, which is believed to be around 125,000 movies and TV show episodes.
Mediaweek took the opportunity to talk through some of the ways that Tubi is very different to its competitors in the market.
Mediaweek: Most media will talk about their core demographic or specific type of audience they’re chasing. Tubi instead will talk about library size and let audiences settle their way into it.
David Salmon: Yeah, the Tubi programming model is much more algorithmic rather than merchandised, and by that I mean we are driving unique personalisation for every consumer. That typically means that we don’t try to identify the demo we’re chasing. It’s more, people come onto the platform and ultimately lots of them find a home in their fandoms, in these areas of niche that potentially other platforms don’t really satisfy.
A lot of this is a consequence of us being a kind-of digital-first content offering whereas a lot of the traditional BVOD services, if you were to use any of the broadcast services in Australia, what you’d probably see is an approach to programming that quite closely reflects a legacy form of programming from a linear channel, right?
They’re trying to get every single person to watch the same piece of content simultaneously, and fundamentally Tubi is more of a reflection for the way that content consumption has changed, which is people expect extreme personalisation, people expect to have ultimate choice, and the way we’ve been able to be very successful was because we actually take this highly personalised approach. It’s endemically built into the core of our product offering. Every consumer gets a different home screen, and that really works in contrast to a sort-of monolithic approach to treating your user base like a cohort, which actually is quite consumer unfriendly in lots of different ways.
The other thing I’d mention is that you see it with a lot of the big subscription services as well. How often have you opened one of the major SVOD services and been served their latest hero piece of content, despite the fact that you’ve watched nothing that’s even remotely adjacent to it? And again, it’s because they’re using content to drive customer acquisition and conversion, whereas we’re looking for it to drive engagement and for people to really feel like they found a home on Tubi. It’s a very different strategy, and, I think, that really is why we’ve been able to find a lot of space in a market that otherwise feels like it’s highly congested.
Mediaweek: That hero programme being served never bothers me as much as irrelevant push notifications.
David Salmon: They’re sort of symptoms of the same problem, which is if you treat every consumer like the median consumer, everybody gets a watered-down experience. Everybody getting served the same push notification about a series they have never demonstrated any propensity to be interested in, I think, is a very clear reflection of it..
Mediaweek: We’re talking to you today because of the All Screens event, which is very much News Australia going to market asking media buyers to allocate their spend money with you. There’s an interesting bit of friction with the idea of you speaking to that very personalised experience, but at the same time, I’m sure it is easier for the sales team to be able to go out there and say “This is the audience we’re talking to”.
David Salmon: I think we’ve consistently seen that the marketers who are deploying their budgets most efficiently are not treating audience in these huge cohort buckets. There are times where, as a brand marketer, you want to maximise reach and therefore you’re going to do it on some of the more quote-unquote mainstream legacy services. But, one of the things that Tubi’s really effective at delivering is this idea of incremental audiences. In all of our markets, including in Australia, we actually offer really, really strong incrementality versus our peer set.
What I mean by that is Tubi has quite a unique slice because it offers an adjacent programming approach that’s highly algorithmic and based on these extreme, really interesting deep fandoms. It means that a lot of the time you’re not just constantly rebuying the same audience.
Just to kind of give you a couple of stats on this, because I always think it’s kind of useful, if we were to look at the other free services in Australia, and we were to look at the way that Tubi competes with them… 70% of the Tubi audience doesn’t use 10Play, 63% doesn’t use 9Now, 59% doesn’t use 7Plus.
When you’re a marketer and you spend a dollar on Tubi, you actually know that that’s very effective incremental reach.
(L-R) Lou Barrett, David Salmon, and Pippa Leary
Mediaweek: What’s the approach to brand safety that’s held by the team at Tubi?
David Salmon: All of the content that sits on the platform goes through active screening from our content merchandising teams.
So they’re responsible for going through and assessing the suitability of content on Tubi. We then also have a totally independent standards and practises group who reviews every piece of content that we exhibit.
There is a lot of range of content. For example, if you only wanted to sit and consume things that are slightly more kind of adult-themed, ultimately there is going to be a lot of library in every direction. We also allow advertisers to pick and choose the way they target.
Mediaweek: All of the ratings and classifications on Tubi aligns with US classifications. There’s TV-PG, TVY, which are not what we use here.
David Salmon: On the targeting side, we have a way to map the US… There’s obviously a global standard for how you map ratings against each of the different domestic standards. We also provide that to partners.
Mediaweek: Speaking further to the brand safety issue, there’s a fair bit of children’s content on the service. Often this content is sitting on content shelves alongside some adult-orientated content like horror films.
David Salmon: There is a real mixture of content. I would say that Tubi as a service in Australia is aimed at being 18 plus. The breadth of our library means that you will find some animated programming. But in general, the kind of value proposition itself is targeted at a kind of 18 plus demo..
Mediaweek: Tubi has a login that isn’t mandatory. What percentage of your audience are generally logged in versus not?
David Salmon: Up to three-quarters of the consumption on Tubi is from authenticated users. But the product experience itself has always been built around offering carrots rather than sticks, right? We’re not trying to lock consumers out, but we’re giving people really good reasons to ultimately become an authenticated consumer.
For example, you’ll see that your watch list is only available to authenticated users. Your continue-watching is only available to authenticated users. And it gives people a really positive reason to want to go through the signup process rather than feeling like it’s a kind of immediate gate to access.
Mediaweek: In terms of emails to the Tubi audience, how frequently are you contacting them?
David Salmon: We do provide a range of marketing emails that are personalised. You’ll notice a lot of the time the correspondence or the push notifications will be uniquely personalised to your preferences. It varies per user depending upon the different newsletters that they’ve signed up to, but generally it wouldn’t be more than once a week.
Mediaweek: People subconsciously attach a value to services. A cheaper, or free service like Tubi, will lead the audience to assumptions about what that experience will be. How are you framing those conversations with the audience?
David Salmon: That’s a really interesting question to us. The value of the simplicity of being free is very useful as we think about our brand, but we don’t really think about it as being the key determining brand value that we’re trying to put across to consumers.
Free is a huge benefit for people getting into and discovering content on the service. But in general, we want the Tubi brand to be reflective of our audience. We want it to be about sort of discovery and surprise and delight. We want it to be about those rabbit holes of content that people kind of get into where they go through that process of personalisation and discovery.
In a market like Australia, where there is such a glut of free services, we don’t see it as being a really key determining factor that’s going to drive our success in the market. So Tubi doesn’t really segment its categories too heavily from a user perspective.
Mediaweek: There’s not a lot of emphasis on originals. They’re just kind of part of the content mix.
David Salmon: Originals do play a really key role in helping fill gaps in areas where we potentially can add to the type of storytelling that sits on the platform. We are adding more and more of our global originals to the Australian platform moving forwards, and actually, over the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of success with a Tubi original a couple of months ago called Worth the Wait, which we released as a Hawaii-themed romance story. It was commissioned from the US, but we made it available globally. Then just last month, we had really, really good success with Please Don’t Feed the Children, which was the directorial debut of Destry Spielberg, Steven Spielberg’s daughter, which again was an original on the platform that did really well. You’ll see more and more of those start to creep into the interface over the next few months.