FOX Enriches Its Marketing and Ad Insights Using AWS Data and ML Solutions

As a result of building a unified data solution, FOX has enriched its media and advertising insights and laid the groundwork for ML. The company is also using the historical data that it has stored in the cloud for its game catch-up feature, which automatically identifies key moments from a live event and delivers a replay to fans. And it uses Amazon Rekognition for providing heads-up insights, such as player stats, to its sportscasters and production teams. “It’s the first time we’ve done that for soccer, and it’s a really exciting product that we have,” says Silver.

For its NFL market teams, FOX applies ML to provide near-real-time forecasts and insights about each matchup, which helps FOX understand interest and engagement and inform broadcast decisions in local markets. “You’ll actually see us improving the projections throughout the weeks leading up to the game,” says Silver.

FOX has taken a self-service approach to empowering its teams with data insights. It has set up controls to provide users with the appropriate level of access to its data lake and datasets, helping foster collaboration across business units to continue to deliver content that excites its audiences. “We’re aiming to automate these processes, and it takes time and money and effort,” says Silver. “We’re sure thankful for collaborators like AWS because they make it a little bit simpler for us.”

FOX built a data lake using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data for all its advertising events and the audience signals that it uses to improve campaign performance. The company uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. To track audience pixels, the company uses AWS Lambda —a serverless, event-driven compute service—and Amazon Data Firehose, which reliably loads near-real-time streams into data lakes, warehouses, and analytics services.

In order to help its customers better understand brand suitability of shows, FOX built ATLAS, a solution that uses artificial intelligence to identify contextual ad opportunities by analyzing petabytes of media files, such as TV shows and movies, and providing near-real-time
metadata about them to advertisers. “In a world where context matters more than ever, ATLAS provides a new and precise level of insight and segmentation that will give buyers confidence when transacting with FOX,” says Lindsay Silver, senior vice president of data platforms and commercial technology at FOX. “By using AWS, all our videos are tagged
with context at a subminute level and in entities in all kinds of factors over about 150 attributes per point in time.”

Media Insights on AWS was used to accelerate the development of ATLAS for applying ML to its media workloads. It also uses Amazon Rekognition, a service that automates and lowers the cost of image recognition and video analysis with ML, to analyze its full media library and generate contextual data in ATLAS.

To further enrich its marketing analytics, FOX is exploring the use of AWS Clean Rooms, which help customers and their partners more easily and securely collaborate and analyze their collective datasets without sharing or copying one another’s underlying data. FOX anticipates that using AWS Clean Rooms across its brands will help it achieve audience activation and facilitate brand awareness and consistency.