Melissa Test

Table of Contents

1. Disconnected data slowed FOX down
2. Moving faster with data standardization and integrations at scale
3. Connecting with hundreds of millions of users at scale
4. Delivering flawless digital experiences for the Super Bowl
5. Results

FOX Corporation is a leading media entertainment corporation that produces and delivers compelling news, sports, and entertainment through a portfolio of brands, including FOX News Media, FOX Sports, FOX Entertainment and FOX Television Stations. FOX is accessible to almost all U.S. households and operates dozens of digital properties delivering content to nearly 500M monthly devices (MTUs).

With the rapid increase of cord cutting and accelerated adoption of digital viewing, FOX needed to deliver more personalized and compelling digital experiences for consumers across its portfolio. Unfortunately, separate tech stacks across brands and disconnected data slowed teams down and prevented advanced customer data strategies. 

Daryl Bowden, Executive Vice President of Technology at FOX Corporation, was tasked with finding a solution to standardize and deliver customer data to a complex stack of analytics, marketing, sales, and advertising tools. Daryl turned to Twilio Segment to align all brands around a single source of truth for customer data, gain a singular view of all users, and personalize digital experiences across channels. As a result, FOX is able to move faster and create optimized user experiences at scale. 

Disconnected data slowed FOX down

For all its success over the years, FOX didn’t need to build direct relationships with individual consumers. FOX’s market segments were giant categories of audiences with broad attributes. FOX did not have or need visibility across its many business units, nor did it need tools to bring all of its consumer interactions into one place.

However, with the media and entertainment landscapes continuing to shift toward mobile and OTT streaming, FOX needed to focus on more engagement through its digital platforms. For FOX to be successful now, the organization required access to centralized customer data.

Unfortunately, a complete understanding of users across properties was nearly impossible with the patchwork of data collection frameworks implemented across the organization. Plus, each of FOX’s digital brands had 40+ applications that were integrated to 30+ downstream tools, resulting in nearly 1200 integrations the engineering team had to build and maintain. In order to make customer data useful, engineering teams had to spend enormous amounts of time cleaning and standardizing data and connecting tools, which made it difficult to implement advanced data strategies and improve the user experience. 

FOX needed a solution to avoid these bottlenecks and give teams access to standardized customer data to deliver optimized digital experiences. 

Moving faster with data standardization and integrations at scale

After evaluating a number of solutions, Daryl and team chose to implement Twilio Segment across a few of the FOX brands, including FOX, FX, and National Geographic. FOX saw immediate results; Twilio Segment made it faster to deploy data products, and reduced the number of engineering hours required to connect tools and maintain integrations.

For example, one of the FOX newsroom brands wanted to trial Chartbeat to better understand customer interests. The process of connecting Chartbeat to Twilio Segment took no more than 15 minutes. Without Twilio Segment, the typical turnaround for this type of instrumentation would have been a two-week sprint. In just this one example, FOX saved nearly 2 weeks of time using Twilio Segment. In Daryl’s words: “This is still one of the main reasons that we use Twilio Segment today. And if this is all that Twilio Segment did for us, I'd still be incredibly happy.”

Following this success, FOX implemented Twilio Segment across all of its business units and digital properties. FOX now runs all historical data through Twilio Segment to its warehouses and has enabled more than 680 unique integrations (1,200 total) within 3 workspaces with Twilio Segment. Centralized customer data infrastructure has saved thousands of engineering hours on data pipeline work, and enables FOX to save thousands of additional engineering hours when integrating newly acquired companies, like Tubi, Credible, or OutKicktheCoverage, into the FOX infrastructure. FOX can now move faster and accelerate the success of new tools, new companies, and new teams with Twilio Segment.

Connecting with hundreds of millions of users at scale

On top of being able to collect, unify and connect FOX’s data, Twilio Segment provides a singular view of users that enables teams to create personalized experiences across brands and digital touchpoints. FOX marketing, advertising, analytics, product, content, and editorial teams now have self-serve access to customer data and the flexibility to activate that data to deliver optimized digital experiences. Daryl explains how this has enabled teams across the company to build direct relationships with digital users:

“When you use any of our apps, you should be greeted like an old friend. When we deliver an ad to you, it should be relevant. When we suggest content to you, it should be in line with your tastes. This is all thanks to Twilio Segment.”

For example, FOX Sports recently redesigned the FOXSports.com and the FOX Sports app, incorporating enhanced personalization at its core. FOX Sports uses data-driven insights to deliver the personalized stories and content users care most about. For instance, the FOX Sports “For You” product uses Twilio Segment data to give passionate fans access to content covering their favorite leagues, teams, and players in real-time. The data running through Twilio Segment, which is being leveraged in real-time through ML modeling, allows FOX Sports to provide a more engaging experience, deliver the most relevant content, and provide up-to-date statistics and sports news to users in highly consumable formats.