{"id":499114,"date":"2026-06-18T13:39:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T13:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/499114\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T13:39:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T13:39:07","slug":"fox-offers-advertisers-chance-to-create-animated-series-with-toonstar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/499114\/","title":{"rendered":"Fox Offers Advertisers Chance to Create Animated Series With Toonstar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFox<\/a>\u2018s new offer to advertisers may get Madison Avenue a little animated.<\/p>\n

\n\tFox, known for Sunday-night fare like \u201cThe Simpsons,\u201d \u201cBob\u2019s Burgers\u201d and \u201cAmerican Dad!,\u201d wants to give marketers more cartoonish content to work with, whether it be an original animated short or series or a new piece of \u201cbranded content\u201d devised in collaboration with the sponsor. To do so, Fox has struck a partnership with Toonstar<\/a>, a production outlet that creates high-quality animation much faster than the stuff that is produced for some of the network\u2019s popular series.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe are one of the bigger properties out there that has always been committed to animation, and that Sunday night is so incredibly important to us,\u201d says Katrina Cukaj, executive vice president of advertising sales and portfolio marketing at Fox Advertising, during a recent interview.<\/a> \u201cHow do we continue to broaden and innovate?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe answer, for now, is with Toonstar, which will create animated content for digital venues, much of which will rely on creators and have the potential to respond immediately to cultural events and trends. One of the challenges Fox has with its TV programs is that they appeal to younger audiences, but have a long production schedule, which makes the process of embedding advertising messages in the shows more difficult.<\/p>\n

\n\tToonstar, founded by John Attanasio and Luisa Huang, two veterans of animation programming at Disney and Warner Bros., \u201chas some pretty cool technology that helps them formulate their animation content in real time, which is incredibly valuable from a market perspective,\u201d says Cukaj. The company works with digital creators to make animated content that appears in venues such as YouTube, says Attansio, and \u201cthey\u2019re natives to those platforms, and we feel like this is going to give them a chance to get more stuff made and to monetize the stuff that they get made at a higher level.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThanks to digital technology, \u201cyou can do animated content and respond to what the audience signals are. You can engage them in in the storytelling,\u201d says Attansio. \u201cThis idea of sort of doing real-time animation unlocks an ability to make the content feel more timely. It feels more part of pop culture. And I think that the ability to do that is really attractive to brands.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFox has continued to build out an animation portfolio, and is expected in the 2027-2028 to launch a spin-off of its long-running \u201cFamily Guy\u201d series built around the popular character Stewie. Fox in 2019 acquired an animation studio, Bento Box, which has been involved in series including Netflix\u2019 \u201cThe Who Was Show\u201d as well as Fox\u2019 \u201cKrapopolis.\u201d But the agreement with Toonstar will give advertisers seeking animation more options, says Cukaj, as well as a chance \u201cto create content in which we make them part of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOver the years, Fox\u2019s animation has attracted sponsors from the quick-service restaurant category, says Cukaj, as well as the retail, gaming and technology sectors.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe move extends Fox\u2019s ties to the creator community<\/a>. Over the past year, Fox properties including Fox Sports and Fox News Channel have been more open to creating business partnerships with digital personalities ranging from the outspoken Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy to the members of the popular conservative \u201cRuthless\u201d podcast.<\/p>\n

\n\tToonstar is backed by media and technology investors including Founders Fund, Greycroft, Snap, and GFR.<\/p>\n

\n\tFox\u2019s Cukaj says the company has already had some preliminary conversations with advertisers about working with Toonstar, one of which involved the prospect of \u201cproducing some episodic series together,\u201d and says Fox is ready immediately to discuss potential deals that involve Toonstar\u2019s animation services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fox\u2018s new offer to advertisers may get Madison Avenue a little animated. Fox, known for Sunday-night fare like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,17680,85,46,179354,229655],"class_list":["post-499114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-fox","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-toonstar","tag-upfront"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}