Inside the ad tech firm Disney will get in its Fox acquisition
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Along with FX’s gritty dramas and Marvel characters like Deadpool and X-Men, Walt Disney will also obtain a much lower-profile, but potentially critical business unit, that could help the Mouse House revamp TV advertising, when its acquisition of Fox closes.
When Fox bought the ad-tech startup TrueX for $200 million in February 2015, ad-skipping had become the norm and commercial-free competitors like Netflix were rapidly gaining market share. TrueX, which was co-founded by Fox’s current and soon-to-be-ex ad sales chief Joe Marchese, positioned itself as an answer to the commercial clutter that has plagued the TV industry and has made digital competitors more attractive to both consumers and advertisers.
While its ad formats like engagement ads that prompt viewers to watch a commercial in exchange for an ad-free experience — weren’t revolutionary in themselves, TrueX brought to Fox a group of people and a culture that helped initiate efforts to fix TV advertising. Now many of those people are headed to Disney (though Marchese himself is leaving Fox).
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