For those who might not know, what is Tubi?
It's the largest collection of free streaming in the world — well, in the markets that we're in. And it's completely free and frictionless. We focus on fandoms, so we're really specific about making sure that we have depth and breadth in our catalogue, so no matter what you're into, you can go really deep.
When you tell people you work for Tubi, do they know what you’re talking about?
It has changed so much. I've been at Tubi for almost four-and-a-half years, and when I was recruited for the role, I had no idea what it was. And this was in 2022. This was the start of the streaming wars and the start of it getting very competitive and there being signs in the market of consumer fatigue and price hikes. When they called me, I was like, “I don't know if I want to enter the streaming wars with a streamer that I've never heard of.” But I think there were a lot of trends that Tubi was riding that I thought were really interesting in terms of the way people consume content.
A funny story: on the drive to Toronto from Buffalo, when we stopped at the border, they were questioning me and I said I worked at Tubi. The guy in the booth was like, “Oh, I love Tubi, I've been watching it more,” and then the driver was like, “I love Tubi, too!” And I was like, “This is different, because I've come here every year and in Canada our awareness is not as high as it is in the U.S.,” so I was happy to hear that.
Tubi’s been in Canada for a few years, but what is its current market exposure?
One in five Canadians watch Tubi, so that's incredible strength in viewership. We've had a lot of growth in the market: 22% growth in total viewing time and 34% growth in weekly average viewers. So year-on-year we've had a lot of growth here. We also have invested in an office and local talent. We have Gabe Lindo, who's our GM, but I also have a marketing team here now, and I am just very cautious about marketing and markets without having a local team to tell us how the brand should show up and make sure that it is locally relevant.
Why have you chosen right now as the time to do this big ad blitzkrieg?
I don't want to ship over U.S. campaigns to this market. So I just think it's having the right team in place and the growth in place to actually have a brand campaign here. We have done launches for original content here, but we've never articulated the clear message of what Tubi should mean in this market and why people should care. So the campaign that we just recently launched, "Find Any Feeling for Free," was an insight that the Canadian marketers felt would really land well here — you could ask, well, who cares if you have the largest library with 220,000 movies and TV shows in Canada, but what that means is we own the largest emotional range of outcomes, and people watch something to feel something, and especially now, we're all dealing every day with tons of emotional noise.
And you're wanting to, I think, take a break from social and quiet that noise, and if you want to feel more scared, then you're already scared, or you want to feel escape, or you want to feel nostalgia for a time that was 10 years ago, all those outcomes are available on TV and we can uniquely own that. And I don't think other streamers can own that because they don't have that size and that depth.
What is it that Tubi likes about Canada?
Canada's always been a place where stories can be stranger than what we'd accept in the U.S., and things incubate here and then they get popular and set the stage for the best movies and comedy ever. So this has always been a place where people could, I think, experiment. And what they used to play on the public stations here — Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short, they were just fucking around and having fun with it — and I think Canadians have always been okay not following Hollywood standards. It always just felt to me like the perfect market, and so I'm excited to finally have the right pieces in place to actually be louder in this market.
Do you have any further plans to lay more roots in Canada?
We're continuing to invest, and I believe that 10% of our total viewing time is on Canadian content in Canada. And from a talent perspective for originals, I don't know if it's intentional, but we have a lot of Canadian talent that's on screen and we film a lot of stuff here, so I think that's going to continue to happen.
There’s a viral X post that reads “I wanna work at Tubi so bad, I bet they let you smoke cigs in the office.” How much do you embrace this sort of trashy reputation?
Well, smoking cigarettes doesn't mean that you don't have good taste in content. I mean, aren't cigarettes kind of back? And I would say the Canadians with Heated Rivalry kind of put cigarettes back on the map.
I get great joy out of those tweets because I like that our audience doesn't see us as this stodgy Hollywood gated big corporate machine. They see that we respond to them, that we are in on the joke, and I think you can't ignore what's true about your brand. We do take more creative liberties, and we do in our marketing take more risk than you see entertainment companies taking, and so I honour it, I don't think it's bad. It gives me a good laugh and I think it's funny that they are always thinking about who's actually working there. I'll see in the comments sometimes, “someone from Jersey is definitely running this account.” And I'm like, “I'm from New Jersey and so was our head of social. How do they know?”
How much do you pay attention to fan posts on social media?
I’m a social gremlin. I love looking at lists. There’s lists like Tubi: Disney Edition, and it's not actually Disney. It’s Disney-like stuff — there's a lot of Alice in Wonderland remixes and creepy shit. And so it's fun because the viewers go deep and then they create all these lists and they share them with their community. There's a man on Reddit, on the horror thread, who has an entire spreadsheet where he ranks and rates every single horror movie on Tubi, and you can click out to every film, and the horror community loves that. As a marketer, it's kind of a gift that you have all these riches. It's like, what do you focus on? So we just look for fan signals and follow them.
It’s been reported that both Disney and Netflix are exploring adding free tiers. How is Tubi preparing for the possibility of having more competition in this free ad-supported space?
Free and ad-supported has always been our business model from day one. We have not changed that, and that's what we're going to continue to focus on. We don't view it as a teaser to be upsold into anything else. I think that still creates friction for viewers that is suboptimal to the viewing experience. So I don't feel any way about [Disney and Netflix adding free tiers]. I think we're just going to continue to focus on our products — and we license content from all those studios, so it'll be interesting to see — but I think their business model is they're doing it for upsell. It's just our core business model.
Do you have any predictions for the direction the streaming wars are headed?
I think a lot of complexity is being added to streaming because of pressure on business models, and I see to be as a haven from that. I think we always want to give viewers choice and a frictionless experience and the content that they want when they want it and how they want it. So I would just say that as the industry gets more complicated, I don't necessarily think that that's pro-viewer and pro-audience and pro-content. But I think the good thing is that there are a lot more avenues for creators and for filmmakers to platform stories, and I think that's a net good.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
