What you need to know: 

• Foxtel Media said it will spend $3 million in 2022 to help 10 brands willing to spend their test and learn budgets developing new ad formats and metrics. 
• The new fund, called Foxtest, takes the challenge to the marketers, after Nine announced an attention metric study last month and holdcos and indies pile into the attention planning and buying.
• Foxtel now has four million paying customers across its brands, which include Kayo, Binge, and new news platform, Flash. 

Foxtel Media says is bidding to develop new engagement metrics, ad formats and ways to segment data, and will spend $3 million in 2022 experimenting – and wants advertisers to co-fund the innovation push.

After Nine announced last month it had struck a deal with Karen Nelson-Field’s Amplified Intelligence to develop a tradeable attention metric, Foxtel Media has instead issued the challenge to brands: come and figure out new ways to trade with us and share both the risk and reward.

Known as Foxtest, the firm hopes the $3m fund combined with advertiser firepower will go beyond attention and engagement and into areas that advertisers and buyers are trying to solve as third party cookies are culled.

“Foxtest is about the projects that help us and our clients leapfrog the market. Broadly under the areas of content, ad experience and data, we want to broaden the horizons of what media is and could be, orientated always towards your business outcomes,” Foxtel Media CEO Mark Frain told the company’s Showcase yesterday.

“Think about assessing and pricing our inventory based on different engagement metrics like mental focus, intent, social connection, and emotional investment. Or co-inventing a new ad unit or a new ad tactic that suits a creative format rather than making creative fit a template. Or turning the machines towards buying context programmatically.”

For its first year, Foxtest will partner with 10 brands, and Foxtel Media is actively making a play for companies with test and learn budgets.

Testing began six months ago, and Hyundai and Westpac were first off the blocks. Westpac’s Group Head of Brand, Advertising and Media, Jenny Melhuish, told an Mi3 commercial podcast last week there’s still a way to go with engagement metrics.

“The CPM metric is a rational one… we need to believe in the robustness of a metric, and currently, we don’t have a robust [engagement] metric,” she said.  

But the bank is testing the links between the cost of advertising and its effectiveness with Foxtel Media, and it is precisely that kind of approach the company now aims to replicate and scale-up.

“Bring us your problem – and your innovation budget – and let’s get cracking,” said Frain.