When Marianne Gambelli got her start in advertising, women were never part of teams that sold sports, beer or cars. But in her first sales job at Grey Advertising, she worked on the Miller Beer account. That was only the first of the ceilings that she burst right through.

Gambelli was later on the NBC Sports team, ending up as president of sales
and marketing for NBCUniversal. She led upfronts worth several billion dollars, often setting the market in NBC’s “Must-See TV” era. 

Gambelli went on to spend 10 years as Horizon Media’s chief investment officer, where she got an education in advanced advertising as ads moved away from Nielsen ratings and demographics and toward data-based metrics and impressions. She then brought that education to Fox, where she was president of advertising sales, marketing and brand partnerships.

“I wasn’t one of those who had to be promoted,” Gambelli said. “I just did the work. I felt like that work got recognized and then things happened, doors opened that weren’t open before. I honestly don’t feel like they had to have a female so they picked me. I felt that I earned it.”

Gambelli’s performance in all of her roles has certainly opened doors for other women to come through. “We grew up with heads of ad sales all being men; now they are all women,” Keith Turner, who worked with Gambelli as NBC’s president of ad sales, said. “She never panicked and was always able to operate effectively and lead.”

That sense of confidence gave other leaders confidence in her, allowing her to both to lead as she saw fit and also influence overall corporate decisions. “Whenever we were in the room — and I was often with her in rooms that included the likes of Bob Wright, Jeff Zucker and Steve Burke — she was always a commanding presence,” Ed Swindler, an independent media consultant to Fox who formerly held several executive roles at NBC, said. “She always had a point of view that they wanted to know and she was trusted. Trust is the basis for most of her success.” 

One of the things Gambelli learned is that “you’re interviewing for the job when you don’t even know you are interviewing for it.” For example, she developed a tight relationship with Jeff Zucker when he was NBC’s head of West Coast entertainment in 2000. When he was promoted to CEO of NBCUniversal Television group in 2005, he knew right away who would lead his ad-sales team. 

“Watch the relationships you have as you are growing. They are what comes back to you,” Gambelli said. 

Relationship Builder

Cultivating strong relationships is what brought Gambelli to Fox in 2017. About a year and half prior, a mutual friend introduced her to Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Aber­nethy. They met for breakfast. “When we got there, I think we were both like, ‘why are we here,’ but we hit it off,” she said. “It was probably one of the best meetings I’ve ever had. A year and a half later, when the head ad sales job opened, he called me.” 

Gambelli spent the last seven years of her career at Fox, years that she said were her favorite because “they let you run your business, but there was also lots of support.” In 2020, Gambelli launched the Fox Ad Sales Diversity and Inclusion Council with the mission to build and enhance the culture of inclusivity.

“I feel the more voices you have that are different, the better off you are as a whole,” she said. “You need different ways of thinking. That lets the whole team rise up.” 

Kristi Curcio-Nolan, VP, ad sales, strategic and business initiatives, engagement and events, office of the president, said diversity and inclusion were always a focus for Gambelli.
“She has always wanted to bring everybody up,” she said. “She was always doing these things but she never needed to be in the spotlight.” 

Gambelli retired from Fox in January after a satisfying four-decade career. “I did things that I never thought I would do,” she said. “I went to the Beijing Olympics, Wimbledon, the French Open. I had so many experiences that one person should never have in one lifetime. If I don’t do anything else for the rest of my life, I will have lived well.” 

Jeff Collins, head of ad sales for Fox News Media, has been named president of advertising sales, marketing and brand partnerships for all of Fox Corp.

Collins will replace Marianne Gambelli, who is retiring and is set to be inducted into the B+C Hall of Fame this September.

“I want to thank Marianne for her many contributions to Fox and congratulate her on a phenomenal career,” Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said. “Marianne has contributed immensely to the successful execution of our strategies, and it has been a great pleasure of mine to work alongside her. Jeff has established himself as a leader and an innovator and we are confident that he will continue to build value for our advertising partners across all of our platforms.”

Collins joined Fox in 2019 from Viant Technology, where he was chief revenue officer. Before Viant, Collins spent 18 years at Turner Broadcasting System.

“I look forward to leading the Ad Sales team as we continue to work with our valued partners to provide unique and compelling connections with the passionate audiences only Fox can offer,” Collins said.

Gambelli was with Horizon Media before joining Fox as head of sales for Fox News Media. She assumed her larger role across Fox brands in 2019. Earlier, she had been with NBCUniversal.

“It has been an honor to lead this talented team during such a transformative period in our industry,” Gambelli said. “I know they are well-positioned under Jeff’s leadership to continue to set the standard for excellence for delivering results for our advertising partners.”

The acquisition of Tubi by Fox in 2020 added to the portfolio Fox ad sales president Marianne Gambelli had to sell to advertisers looking for reach in premium content.

Gambelli, who previously held senior positions at media buyer Horizon and in sales at NBC, will be keynote speaker at the Advanced Advertising Summit, part of Future’s Spring TV week, on April 27 and 28.

In this preview of her appearance, Gambelli talks about how Tubi changed the way Fox sells advertising in its entertainment programming.

In a world where subscription video on demand is the shiny new object, everything in Fox’s portfolio remains ad supported. What does that mean to your clients?

It's funny, when we formed New Fox two years ago, that was our business model. We were going to be fully ad-supported. And then we bought Tubi and that vision seems even smarter now, two years later, post COVID, as we saw people switching to AVOD services. 

We wanted to be fully AVOD supported and I think it gives our clients a breadth of assets and surety of premium content that they may not be getting other places where you have all these platforms and you're probably going to put your mediocre content [on traditional platforms] but you're going to spend to support your SVOD platform. So as a consumer, you're going to go look for an original show and it's going to be behind a paywall on Hulu or Peacock or whatever. I think that's going to be frustrating to consumers. 

If you look at who we are, we're live, we're big and we're fully ad-supported, and that's our focus. That's where our content’s going. And again, if I'm a marketer I'd be nervous about the SVOD explosion because you're limiting how to reach consumers. It gets harder and harder. 

It’s got to be especially hard to reach mass audiences as more SVOD services emerge?

Right. They have to subscribe and then they have to view. Viewers have subscriptions but how often are you in that platform? And how much are you consuming?

Again, it’s immediate scale. That’s what linear broadcast does the best. So you might get scale over time on these platforms, but it might take months to aggregate what you can do in one shot on broadcast. 

You mentioned Tubi. How has Tubi changed Fox's portfolio and its approach to selling ads? 

Tubi was a perfect complement to Fox because it reaches an audience that Fox just doesn't reach. It's younger. It's more diverse. It's the ones that probably don't have a cable subscription that just go to Tubi for their viewing entertainment. So it was a perfect reach extension to who we were already serving. And it gave us a platform for our content, so you see a lot of our entertainment content has migrated there. I think you'll see some of our sports content start to migrate there too. You look at the timing, right? A year ago was a great idea. Now it’s brilliant. Look at the [streaming] explosion and we would not have been able to capture that with the current assets that we have.

How are you taking advantage of having Tubi in the portfolio?

It's a combination. If you’re looking for different attributes besides gender and age, you're looking for other commonalities, we're able to do that across the platform and that's where you really get the extended reach. But again, you're reaching people that you would not reach on linear. That's even more powerful. 

And it has a different ad experience, a lot less ads, more lean-in. So I think the engagement is a different model as well and we're learning from that as well. And we're doing some experimentation there and across Fox to learn from both.

Tell me about the innovations and experiments that benefit advertisers.

First it’s content, right? We all talk about Innovation and we talk about audiences but content still sits at the top of the pinnacle. It’s premium content and how do we connect that. So if you have a fan that's connected to The Masked Singer, how do we find that fan across our platforms on Tubi, Hulu et cetera?

And then how do we understand that engagement? So we've been experimenting with our “Absolute As” [an ad format that gives an advertiser ownership of pre-roll A-position spots on streamed shows] and limited commercials to see what the engagement is like and then how does that play on Fox, how does that play on Tubi and what are the differences there.

But also, It's part of the One Fox [integrated advertising] platform. So there's been lots of ways to integrate and change the way we go to market but also the way our viewer experiences the platforms. 

How are brands planning and buying differently in this new environment of streaming and data and such?

Planning and buying were done so simplistically years ago and you think of how complicated it is now, given the choice of platforms and the data and the technology and how you can activate and access these marketplaces.

It feels like it's much more customized. You used to look at a media plan for one category and a media plan for another and they probably looked the same. I think now with data insights and the ability to optimize and buy inventory in so many different marketplaces, you look at clients and their approach is very very different. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all and all the plans don't look the same and they're iterating as they're learning and as data's coming in. Everything is in real time now, but not everything can be bought in real time. So I think you're laying in your bases and you're deciding on your premium content and your building blocks. And then from there. you can experiment.

Marianne Gambelli will be the opening keynote speaker at the Advanced Advertising Summit on Wednesday April 28 at 12:30 p.m. ET. For more information, click here to find out more.

Fox acquired ad-supported streaming service Tubi in March, but the programmer is already bringing it to market in the upfront conversations it’s having with clients.

“Tubi was the perfect complement for our set of assets,” said Marianne Gambelli, who became president of ad sales after The Walt Disney Co. bought 21st Century Fox last year, leaving a “new Fox” consisting of the Fox broadcast network, Fox News and Fox Sports.

Clients could potentially still buy their mass media on Fox’s broadcast and cable assets, and do more precision marketing to more tightly targeted consumers via Tubi.

“We were mostly focused on linear, so it rounded out our portfolio, giving us the younger audience, giving us the tech and the addressable inventory that we didn’t really have in the assets that remained at new Fox,” Gambelli said. “So it was actually a strategic purchase that made 100% sense helping us expand our portfolio in the marketplace.”

Fox has been bringing Tubi to media buyers as part of its upfront conversations.

RELATED: AVOD Acquisitions Could Spur Advanced Advertising

“Every client that we've kind of talked to is very excited about it,” Gambelli said. “This space is exploding. It’s younger, and there’s less commercialization. I think we’ll learn about that and maybe we migrate some of that innovation to Fox. Addressable is obviously becoming more important as data becomes more available and more actionable.”

Since Fox acquired it, Tubi has been adding content, including The Masked Singer, now the most popular show on the platform. It may also be adding local content from Fox stations in some markets.

Tubi ad sales are led by Tubi’s chief revenue officer, Mark Rotblat. He reports to Gambelli just like the executives in charge of selling the company’s news, sports and entertainment verticals. Because of its content, it will be most closely aligned with the entertainment vertical, Gambelli said.

The idea is to give Tubi its own focus, but at the same time, it fits nicely into different parts of Fox, Gambelli said.

Fox intends to take advantage of Tubi’s technology and the relationship it has with its viewers.

“They know their audience. As they learn your behaviors, they serve up content that they know you’re interested in,” she said. “You’re going to see what Fox does best in terms of content end up on Tubi but again keeping Tubi’s customer-focused experience.”

In this business environment, more targeted media might be an easier sell to advertisers. “It’s easier to justify because it’s targeted and you know you’re reaching that customer” and can demonstrate return on investment, Gambelli said. 

With the concentration of the TV business, and the consolidation of advertising sales teams at those companies, a handful of top sales executives now control more than $22 billion in commercial inventory in the cable business.

Most of that inventory will be negotiated and sold over the next few months in the upfront market, determining the financial fates of those companies or the coming year.

Here is a Multichannel News scorecard of the executives responsible for selling cable advertising and what kind of hand they’ll be bringing to market for next season.

Donna Speciale

Title: President, Turner Ad Sales
Company: Turner
2017 Ad Revenue: $4.033 billion**
Outlook: A top media buyer before joining Turner, Speciale has been on a quest to make the television experience better for viewers and Turner’s portfolio of networks more attractive to media buyers. Turner has been among the early movers by cutting commercial clutter at truTV, creating audience-targeting products and building up branded content production studios. She sees her competitors moving in her direction and ad dollars flowing as a result.

Jon Steinlauf

Title: Chief U.S. Advertising Sales Officer
Company: Discovery Inc.
2017 Ad Revenue: $3.809 billion**
Outlook: Steinlauf, who had been in charge of ad sales at Scripps Networks Interactive, became head of sales for Discovery when the latter company acquired Scripps. The two companies both feature nonfiction programming that is viewed live; as a single company, it will continue to emphasize that advertising works on strongly branded networks because much of it is contextually related to the content, and because fans are receptive to the messages they see in their favorite trusted shows. Discovery’s respected head of sales, Ben Price, will leave after the upfronts.

Sean Moran

Title: Head of Marketing and Partner Solutions
Company: Viacom
2017 Ad Revenue: $3.699 billion**
Outlook: Under Sean Moran, Viacom is looking to build a variety of marketing services that go beyond selling spots. Viacom acquired WhoSay, a social-media influencer marketing company, and VidCon, a place where content creators convene. It has also put together a shopper marketing unit. Viacom expects its Advanced Marketing Services to generate $300 million in revenue this year and that after years of shrinking ad revenue. Viacom forecasts that ad revenues for the fourth fiscal quarter will actually be up.

Laura Molen, Mark Marshall

Titles: Executive VP, Lifestyle and Hispanic Advertising Sales Group, NBCUniversal; Executive VP, Entertainment Advertising Sales, NBCUniversal
2017 Ad Revenue: $3.397 billion**
Outlook: Cable networks are an integral part of NBCUniversal’s expansive television portfolio. Entertainment networks, including USA Network and Syfy, are ratcheting up high-profile programming. USA recently announced a new country-music competition show headlined by Shania Twain and Jake Evans. Its lifestyle networks — Bravo, E!, Oxygen — boast strong connections with consumers that benefit advertisers. With NBCU joining the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium, advertisers will have a broader pool of viewers they can reach using data-driven buying techniques.           

Ed Erhardt

Title: President, Global Sales and Marketing
Company: ESPN
2017 Ad Revenue: $2.609 billion*
Outlook: Live sports events continue to be attractive as on-demand viewing reduces ratings of on-demand programming. That leaves ESPN in a pretty strong position, despite its well-publicized decline in subscribers. Under new president James Pitaro, ESPN continues to position itself as an alternative to primetime for a broader range of products, not just beer and razors, with a large number of women tuning in. In April, ESPN launched its new app and its direct-to-consumer streaming product ESPN+, designed to capture the attention of sports fans and cord cutters and create additional advertising opportunities for sponsors.

Peter Olsen

Title: Executive VP, Advertising Sales
Company: A+E Networks
2017 Ad Revenue: $1.491 billion *
Outlook: At its upfront event in March, Olson promised media buyers that A+E Networks was planning to deliver “no gimmicks, just results.” The company’s networks, led by A&E, History and Lifetime, are doubling down on real-life story telling and it has signed deals with prominent women including Leah Remini, Elizabeth Vargas and Gretchen Carlson. A+E has also been aggressively pressing its work with Data Plus Math, the company getting attention for its attribution platform, which should provide marketers with a scorecard on what media work best and, within TV, which networks and shows really make the cash register ring.

Marianne Gambelli

Title: President, Advertising Sales
Company: Fox News
2017 Ad Revenue: $1.068 billion*
Outlook: With a hurricane of political news blowing across the nation, the category is gaining audiences, and those curious eyeballs are attracting ad dollars from additional advertisers looking for big numbers and live viewing. President Donald Trump’s favorite network has maintained its ranking as the No. 1 cable news channel and viewership is increasing for Fox Business Network. Fox News Channel has also been updating its digital product to attract users and advertisers. With tightly contested midterm elections coming up in November, viewership is expected to rise even more on Fox News and its cable news competitors, all of which will be offering special election-year political news and results packages at premium prices to sponsors.

Scott Collins

Title: President, National Advertising Sales
Company: AMC Networks
2017 Ad Revenue: $960 million**
Outlook: Known best for The Walking Dead, AMC has parlayed owning television’s No. 1 scripted series into big increases in ad rates over the past few years, despite declining viewership for the zombie apocalypse drama. And at a time when “peak TV” conditions are ratcheting up competition for viewers, AMC is doubling down on burnishing its reputation for airing high-quality scripted programming at scale on networks that gladly accept advertising. This year, AMC is also rolling out its data-driven advertising unit, featuring Aurora software that optimizes campaigns across networks.

Ed Georger

Title: Executive VP, Advertising Sales and Digital Media
Company: Crown Media Family Networks
2017 Ad Revenue: $505.9 million *
Outlook: Like the little engine that could, Crown Media’s Hallmark Channels keep increasing viewership with family-friendly and advertiser-safe programming, especially during the fourth-quarter holiday season, which is crucial to a whole range of marketers. Hallmark Channel continues to prosper with its focus on other holidays — Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc. — and its support of pet-related projects, including its Kitten Bowl. Crown is producing additional movies for its maturing Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel and, at a time when many are looking for skinnier bundles, is pushing another linear network with Hallmark Drama.

Louis Carr

Title President, Media Sales
Company: BET
2017 Ad Revenue: $313.0 million*
Outlook: With linear ratings rising for the past three quarters, BET has maintained its status as the No. 1 cable network among African-Americans, a title it has held for 17 consecutive seasons. The network continues to emphasize how its viewers are avid consumers in many categories, including movies. BET special events — such as the BET Awards, the Hip Hop Awards and the Soul Train Awards — also pull big numbers. BET is big on social media and digital, and its BET Experience is the prototype in Viacom’s strategy for bringing fans to live events.

NAME: Marianne Gambelli
TITLE: President, Ad Sales
COMPANY: Fox News Channel

CAREER HIGHLIGHT: Prior to joining Fox News in 2017, Gambelli was investment officer for Horizon Media. Before that, she had spent more than 20 years with NBC, where she was named president of sales in 2016.

QUOTABLE: “There’s a core group that has been here since the beginning and I think they’re really energized around all this change. … The new people, like me, have been accepted. Everybody’s on the same page which is really exciting.”

After ousting founder Roger Ailes and top-rated on-air host Bill O’Reilly in response to sexual harassment charges, Fox News Channel filled several top posts with senior women executives, including Marianne Gambelli, who became president of advertising sales last April.

The changes at Fox News were at the beginning of a wave in the media business, politics and other industries that saw high-profile executives and performers lose jobs because of inappropriate dealing with their female co-workers.

“I think that my whole career has been about making sure that the culture is friendly to women and mentoring women and giving them a role model, so I don’t feel that that’s changed in any way, shape or form,” Gambelli said.

“I feel like there should be a fair environment for everybody. That as a leader is what you’re supposed to do. So that has not changed,” she said.

Breaking Into a Macho Culture
TV advertising sales, once a very macho culture, has seen several women rise to the very top at media companies, including NBCUniversal, CBS, Disney-ABC and Turner.

“It’s sort of been coming,” Gambelli said. “I hope that it’s just that there are qualified executives in the role, regardless of what their gender is.”

Watch MCN: 12 Takeaways From MCN's Wonder Women Class of 2018

You can’t argue with success. It looks like Fox News had a record year in terms of ratings and ad revenue in 2017 and Gambelli continues to make adjustments to the sales department.

“Given her past accomplishments, it is no surprise that Marianne has hit the ground running and is taking Fox News to the next level,” said Jack Abernethy, co-president, Fox News and CEO, Fox Television Stations.

Gambelli began her career as an assistant buyer at Grey Advertising in 1980 and moved to Backer Spielvogel Bates as the first woman to work on the Miller Brewing account. She then went to NBC as an account executive in sports sales in 1990, rising to president of sales for NBC broadcasting in 2010.

After leaving the network, she returned to the agency business as chief investment officer of Horizon Media in 2013.

“It was incredibly valuable to have someone who’d been on the sales side for so long running a major sales organization,” said Dave Campanelli, executive vice president, managing partner, Video Investment at Horizon.

As a manager, Gambelli was able to quickly get to the heart of a matter. “She has a really good ability to cut the BS, cut right to the heart of what an issue was and be able to tackle it and solve it,” Campanelli said.

During her tenure at the agency, media buyers and sellers were gearing up to deal with data. With Gambelli’s background, “I think she was really valuable in explaining back to the networks, this is why this is important to our advertisers. These data optimization tools are what our advertisers are looking for now,” Campanelli said.

Gambelli also got a refresher course on how tough business has become for some clients. “The requests and challenges that we pose to the networks, we don’t pull them out of the sky. They’re usually founded in very real client challenges,” Campanelli said. He expects Gambelli to focus more on being collaborative in terms of maximizing revenue and “solving our clients’ business issues.”

Gambelli agrees her time at Horizon helped her better understand how clients think. “You realize the media mix and the strategy is so much greater than a TV buy or a news buy. You tend to get caught up.”

At the agency, she gained some perspective on how TV fits into the bigger picture. “If I can help solve their problems or speak their language versus just trying to sell them something, I think that makes our messaging more powerful. I’m not making a proposal that makes no sense,” she said.

But Gambelli said she eventually missed being in sales. “I wouldn’t have gone back anywhere, but I felt this was the right place to come to.”

During her time at the agency, the TV sales business had changed.

“Google and Facebook have become more powerful” as competitors for ad dollars, she said. “Four or five years ago, you didn’t know how it was all going to play out.”

As a result, she said, “it’s funny, it’s kind of come full circle because the traditional product, like sports, news, entertainment, the linear products, are still pretty powerful” in terms of the impact they have in helping to generate sales for brands.

Adjusting to the Digital Era
Under Gambelli, Fox News is one of a handful of networks testing a platform by Data Plus Math aimed at attributing the impact of commercials to a product’s sales.

She made a number of other changes at Fox News, promoting some of her top lieutenants and bringing TV and digital sales closer together.

Gambelli is also nearly done with a different, more personal project, rehabilitating a knee she had surgically replaced last year.

While she was up and about on her new joint quickly, “my level of activity and my expectations were completely different,” she said. Now, Gambelli said she’s playing golf and biking, but it took longer than she expected. “It’s been a process, but I’m getting there.”