Fox Entertainment and Sargento are cooking up a cheesy partnership.
Today, the Fox Entertainment ad sales team announced that it was teaming up with the cheese company for the first time to promote Sargento’s Natural American Cheese slices as part of a campaign timed around National Grilled Cheese Month for April.
The partnership will come to life on the network’s culinary reality competition series Next Level Chef starring Gordon Ramsay. The campaign will also include ads on Bite of Fox, the company’s global food brand and entertainment platform that launched in May 2024. Bite of Fox houses Fox’s lifestyle and culinary content and products.
Katrina Cukaj, evp of advertising sales and portfolio marketing at Fox, said the partnership with Sargento is one that’s been in development for a while.
“We were initially talking about our overall food strategy and the focus on food as a powerful genre as we both love grilled cheese—and food—in general,” Cukaj told ADWEEK. “We pitched some pretty concrete opportunities, including the Bite of Fox partnership, and they ended up biting on the idea, so we worked closely to settle in on the April timing.”
During the April 3 and April 10 episodes of Next Level Chef, on-screen graphics will drive viewers to the Bite of Fox landing page where they will be able to find custom, shoppable recipes, along with instructional videos for a roasted garlic and tomato grilled cheese and sesame miso grilled cheese made with the Sargento cheese slices.
The continued rise of shoppable content on TV
According to a recent eMarketer and Shopsense AI study, there was 76.4 million U.S. media buyers who purchased shoppable ads in 2024. That number is expected to grow to 79.5 million this year. The research also found that 63% of consumers find new brands or products through TV content. Meanwhile, 40% are projected to increase their TV-inspired spending over the next year, while roughly 33% expect to spend the same amount.
Fox isn’t the only media brand making its content shoppable. Media brands like New York Times Cooking, Hearst Magazines, and BuzzFeed’s Tasty have also gotten into the space. And NBCUniversal used shoppable content with its TV programming during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
In another example, Marc Lore-backed Wonder recently acquired Tastemade for a reported $90 million to build out an ad network.
