Fox‘s new offer to advertisers may get Madison Avenue a little animated.
Fox, known for Sunday-night fare like “The Simpsons,” “Bob’s Burgers” and “American Dad!,” wants to give marketers more cartoonish content to work with, whether it be an original animated short or series or a new piece of “branded content” devised in collaboration with the sponsor. To do so, Fox has struck a partnership with Toonstar, a production outlet that creates high-quality animation much faster than the stuff that is produced for some of the network’s popular series.
“We are one of the bigger properties out there that has always been committed to animation, and that Sunday night is so incredibly important to us,” says Katrina Cukaj, executive vice president of advertising sales and portfolio marketing at Fox Advertising, during a recent interview. “How do we continue to broaden and innovate?”
The answer, for now, is with Toonstar, which will create animated content for digital venues, much of which will rely on creators and have the potential to respond immediately to cultural events and trends. One of the challenges Fox has with its TV programs is that they appeal to younger audiences, but have a long production schedule, which makes the process of embedding advertising messages in the shows more difficult.
Toonstar, founded by John Attanasio and Luisa Huang, two veterans of animation programming at Disney and Warner Bros., “has some pretty cool technology that helps them formulate their animation content in real time, which is incredibly valuable from a market perspective,” says Cukaj. The company works with digital creators to make animated content that appears in venues such as YouTube, says Attansio, and “they’re natives to those platforms, and we feel like this is going to give them a chance to get more stuff made and to monetize the stuff that they get made at a higher level.”
Thanks to digital technology, “you can do animated content and respond to what the audience signals are, You can engage them in in the storytelling,” says Attansio. “This idea of sort of doing real-time animation unlocks an ability to make the content feel more timely. It feels more part of pop culture. And I think that the ability to do that is really attractive to brands.”
Fox has continued to build out an animation portfolio, and is expected in the 2027-2028 to launch a spin-off of its long-running “Family Guy” series built around the popular character Stewie. Fox in 2019 acquired an animation studio, Bento Box, which has been involved in series including Netflix’ “The Who Was Show” as well as Fox’ “Krapopolis.” But the agreement with Toonstar will give advertisers seeking animation more options, says Cukaj, as well as a chance “to create content in which we make them part of the story.”
Over the years, Fox’s animation has attracted sponsors from the quick-service restaurant category, says Cukaj, as well as the retail, gaming and technology sectors.
The move extends Fox’s ties to the creator community. Over the past year, Fox properties including Fox Sports and Fox News Channel have been more open to creating business partnerships with digital personalities ranging from the outspoken Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy to the members of the popular conservative “Ruthless” podcast.
Toonstar is backed by media and technology investors including Founders Fund, Greycroft, Snap, and GFR.
Fox’s Cukaj says the company has already had some preliminary conversations with advertisers about working with Toonstar, one of which involved the prospect of “producing some episodic series together,” and says Fox is ready immediately to discuss potential deals that involve Toonstar’s animation services.
.FOX Advertising and Toonstar today announced a strategic partnership designed to create new opportunities for marketers to connect with audiences through digital-first animation, creator-led storytelling, and culturally responsive content. The companies will showcase the collaboration at Cannes Lions next week.
The collaboration will combine FOX’s advertising sales expertise and distribution capabilities with Toonstar’s proprietary production engine, Ink & Pixel™, that produces fast, high-quality animation at scale. Toonstar’s audience intelligence technology, SPOT™, adds a further edge by integrating real-time audience data directly into the creative proces
