I have a couple more that are still waiting to join. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Alicia Reese, a media and entertainment analyst here at Wedbush. I'm joined by Michael Pachter, also an analyst here at Wedbush for a long time, and we have Fubo with us today. Amit Patte, he's SVP of Investor Relations, and Dina Roman, Senior VP of Advertising. She has extensive experience in the advertising industry, particularly as it comes together in content, advertising, and video technology. And so we're very pleased to have you with us today, Dina and Amit, thank you so much.
So, Dina, if we could start on the top, I dare say that Fubo, for the attendees, does not need to be discussed in terms of what you are, what you do. It's pretty clear to many. So I'd really like to start by digging in. Can you talk about having been head of ad sales over the last year and a half. Can you talk about some of the changes that you've made so far in terms of the go-to-market strategy for Fubo?
Yeah, sure. First of all, it's, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Alicia. I would say the biggest change that we made, in the last year is really driving our direct IO and programmatic guaranteed business, and we do that, a variety of different ways. One is by, you know, packaging our audiences and our content genres together around, key tentpole and seasonal events, so like, you know, Halloween or, the holidays, for example. We also leverage our first-party data, and third-party data with some new, partnerships that we've created in the last year. We're always emphasizing, quite frankly, the unique and really premium quality of our audience, and particularly in the last year, using, engagement and attention metrics.
And we've partnered over the last year with folks like EDO and TVision, who are specialists in this area. And then I think the final area, which is actually really exciting and fun, is the introduction of new innovative ad formats. And so all of these areas that we've been working on really come together to help drive our direct IO and programmatic guaranteed business. I'd also say it's kind of interesting, you know, to watch streaming. In the early days of CTV, you saw a lot of media companies who were really kind of relying on their direct media prowess, right, and a little less on programmatic.
Clearly, the shift is underway, and Fubo has been really lucky, and we're very different in that regard because from our inception, we've always had a long and strong ad pipeline in the programmatic space. And so leaning into direct sales and programmatic guaranteed sales, which is also a type of direct sales, continues to foster additional business for us, and it bolsters the programmatic business as that business continues to grow. So it's additive. It's also beneficial from a marketer perspective because marketers wanna use these new capabilities to target customers and particularly sports fans, right, in new and unique ways around this content, around these seasonal events.
So getting their money down, in a guaranteed way is actually really important when it comes to things like high-demand sports inventory, because if they left it to the whims of a programmatic auction, that could be very challenging. They may not win the auction, and they may not get on air. So that's really what we've been talking about in the marketplace, and it's been proving pretty successful for us.
Excellent, and as you said, you market yourself as a sports-first offering to the consumer, of course. How do marketers respond to that message, and does that help your pricing and sell-out?
Yeah, you know, marketers respond really favorably to sports, and I think you know that, Fubo streams over 55,000 sporting events every year. We carry most of the NFL, MLB, I'm sorry, there's so many that we stream, NBA, NHL, most of the college sports. We're also known as the home for local sports, a lot of soccer leagues, so, we've gained a really strong reputation, and people recognize that we have a lot of breadth and depth. The other thing that's interesting is that, you know, sports is one of the content areas now, if you really think about it, that is viewed live. And I actually like to talk about it as the new appointment viewing, like the new must-see TV, if you will.
And so in a way, it's become part of the cultural zeitgeist. You know, it's what people wanna talk about at the water cooler the next day, and you don't wanna be the, at least I don't wanna be the odd man out, certainly not at Fubo, if Caitlin Clark had a great scoring basketball game. And you know, this is important to marketers, right? Because these are incredibly engaged consumers, and they'll pay top dollar to reach and be in front of those consumers. So we partner with the marketers to actually try to immerse them into these experiences and these relevant moments in time, by building custom packages like I had talked about a few moments ago around these, you know, tentpole events.
Absolutely, sports inventory is in high demand, and as a result of that, it's still relatively scarce, depending on, you know, who you're talking to in the marketplace. It does tend to drive premiums and high sell-outs as a result of that.
And how do you position the inventory to advertisers? And how do they evaluate that compared with other connected TV opportunities? Like, how is it differentiated there?
Yeah, you know, I think if I were to summarize, I would say it's in how we package, which I've been talking about a little bit. It's also definitely the quality of the audience. In terms of how we package, in addition to focusing on, you know, direct and PG business, we use a very tailored, call it a full service sort of custom approach, when we build packages for marketers around marquee events, back to school, Hispanic Heritage Month, and they include the best of our addressable audiences. They include the best of our innovative ad formats, which are enhanced banners, pause ads, marquee units, interactive units.
And as a matter of fact, I don't know if anybody saw this, but just last month, we announced the launch of our Triple Play, which we had done with our launch partner, Walmart. And just to describe how these things come together, this was really special, and they were very excited about it because it included a banner on the Fubo home screen, and then we curated some custom content, a custom content carousel, right at the top of the Fubo home screen. That had to do with back to school, which is a marquee event they wanted to be around. And we selected programming that was appropriate for that theme, and then we enveloped the Walmart brand with really beautiful skin design around that custom carousel.
And then in addition to that, they had some branded long-form content and video that we actually put in the carousel and distributed for them. And of course, all of that had to be approved by the content team, right? Because it has to work for the viewer as much as it has to work for the marketer. And they were super pleased, and it did very well. The other differentiator that I mentioned is the quality of our audience. You know, we have a really premium audience, very affluent, highly educated, terrific purchasing power, and we know a lot about them now, particularly because of these data relationships that we've put into place.
And so we can say things like: We know 62% of the ad impressions that are served on Fubo reach incremental households that you can't reach on linear TV. And we can talk about that because we have a relationship with iSpot that helps us surface that data and tell those stories. We can also say things like, Fubo outperforms the average attention of other ads across cable and CTV, for example, and we can say things like that because we have a relationship with TVision, which has technology that allows us to measure attention. So all of these things, I think, are ways that we differentiate, and they're very meaningful for marketers. But, you know, they wanna make sure that when they're putting their money down, that they're getting a real value and return on investment.
And you recently announced partnerships with TransUnion and Comscore.
Yeah.
Can you share details on those partnerships and what they mean for Fubo?
Absolutely. TransUnion allows us to have a greater understanding of our subscribers. You know, we layer in third-party data with TransUnion, and we're able to, for lack of a better word, dimensionalize the subscriber, but not just the subscriber, also the other members in the household. So it'll allow us to determine things like age and gender, things that we don't know just from our subscriber data. And with Comscore, a little bit different. They allow us to position ourselves in terms of, you know, what are we all about relative to the marketplace? So we know a lot about the consumption behavior on Fubo, for example. We know a lot about our subscribers, but what does that mean relative to the marketplace?
So what Comscore can allow us to do is, say things like, during the month of June, for example, we placed among the top 10, actually, I think it was number eight, in terms of hours viewed per day, with two and a half hours, which is a great stat. They also allow us to see that our subscribers are unique and non-duplicative with other services. So we can say things like, 30% of the subscribers on Fubo are also subscribing on Disney and maybe 38% are subscribing on Hulu. And what that also means to a marketer is, "Oh, boy, if I'm buying Hulu and I'm not buying Fubo, I'm missing 62% of my potential target audience," right? So these kinds of tools are incredibly valuable when you're going to market.
I don't know an advertiser that doesn't appreciate sharing the points of view there, you know, when they're looking to spend valuable dollars.
Yeah, absolutely, and obviously, it's evolving rapidly, in the-
market in general, but do you agree? And do you see changes in the connected TV marketplace and just the broader TV ecosystem over the next one to three years? And what do you find interesting there?
That's. There's a lot to unpack there, Alicia. You know, first of all, yes, I absolutely find it rapidly evolving. We're at Adweek here in New York, and I think if you stop 10 people on the street, they'd say the same thing. It's moving very fast in a lot of different dimensions. The two areas that I really keep an eye on are ad innovation and measurement. Ad innovation and measurement because frankly, I think there's a lot of white space there. I think there's a lot of opportunity to grow and innovate. You know, the ad units that we unveiled, the new CTV ad units, that we unveiled, they expand the volume and the variety of the types of opportunities that we can bring to marketers.
They're another tool for them to reach our audience in different ways, but really what they're designed to do is to drive greater engagement and attention, right? More so than you can get with a straight fifteen or a thirty, and so if you can imagine, and maybe some of you are getting this on your own streaming services, but things like interactive ads that are, some people call them squeeze backs, where the video goes up to the right-hand side of the screen and you see an L-bar. That L-bar allows you to push additional information in relation to the video. It could be, it could include a QR code or a poll or a quiz that encourages the user to interact. Pause ads with QR codes, banner ads that have enhanced targeting.
All of these things are innovations that have been, I think, incredibly valuable to the overall television landscape, but definitely to streaming. And in the world of measurement, I will admit it's a bit of a hornet's nest. There's a lot of activity in the world of measurement. You know, but at the end of the day, when you boil it right down, marketers just wanna know, you know, "Are my ads being viewed, and then the consumer taking action?" That's really what they wanna know, and that's been true for time infinitum. So we've really increased our focus in these areas, and we're seeing that clients are very much increasingly more focused on outcomes-based measurement. What are the business outcomes?
And so that's why we've partnered with people like EDO, and iSpot, and TVision to determine things like, you know, audience engagement and incremental reach and attention. And so I can go to a marketer and say, "You know, adults 25-54 on Fubo are 19% more likely to engage with an ad after seeing it on Fubo than they are with other ads on other OTT platforms." That kind of information says to them, "Okay, then I'm gonna put my money there," because that's third-party data information. It's not just Fubo telling me about their subscriber. So, you know, that's the most important thing. I also think it's incredibly important to the industry to try new metrics, to try new ways of measuring, how ads work.
I mean, that's why we're all in this business, to help each other kind of grow our respective businesses. So I'm very excited about those two areas because there's a lot happening there, and I think there's so much more headroom.
I'm wondering if you could just give us some thoughts on just general marketplace inflections or trends this year. Did you notice anything notable in the upfronts or in advertiser expectations? Are the expectations different, particularly around performance guarantees, perhaps?
Yes. I think this upfront was kind of a seminal upfront, if you will. Fubo had a successful upfront, you know, driven by the new go-to-market strategy or addressable targeting. Also, quite frankly, the fact that we aggregate so much sports on the channel, particularly as sports is fragmenting, in addition to the industry fragmenting as much as it has. I would also say that it was a very protracted upfront. It lasted a lot longer and finished up a lot later than I've seen in many years. It was for some partners that we've heard, not us, contentious, and to some degree, I think buyers wanted to see a little bit more uniformity between television CPMs and streaming CPMs.
And which I always find very interesting because you get so much more value for your dollar in terms of data and business outcome information with streaming services. But that was something that they've been working on for a few years, and prognosticators like MDI have actually been starting to report and recap on the upfront, and they're, you know, frankly saying that, you know, streaming was advantaged at linear's expense. I think both sides probably took a little, or saw a little downward pressure on CPM as well, a lot more inventory in the marketplace. The other thing that the agency signaled pretty early on was that they wanted a lot more flexibility, and they wanted a lot more transparency in how they buy.
And those two things are euphemisms for programmatic, so be able to get in and out of the marketplace as quickly as they can. You know, you can't blame them for that. It's been a really interesting macroeconomic environment, and so they're trying to manage their budgets as best they can. You know, I think those are kind of the key themes that I saw emerge.
And can you share what you're seeing in the trends in the CPM advertising space, and also just comparing that to the other media channels, if you could?
You know, I do think the areas that I've been touching upon are really kind of the key trends, and they're still sort of in the early days of development, and they are engagement and attention. There are parties out there, you know, we work with TVision, who also partners with Adelaide, who's developed an audience attention unit that are being made available in programmatic marketplaces. And there are holding companies who are embracing this metric and working with their advertisers to try to train them on how to use these metrics. So, you know, it's still early days, and I think that's going to continue to evolve, and thank goodness we got on that wagon very early. The other area that continues to seem to expand a little bit is this notion of universal IDs in programmatic.
So The Trade Desk's UID2, for example, a RampID. There are a lot of IDs that are being released. We're early adopters of The Trade Desk's UID, and this is important from a privacy perspective and also an omni-channel buying perspective. The other one that I'd add that I don't think we touched on yet would be contextual targeting. This is, I think, a really fun area, if you will, because again, it offers a lot more opportunity. You know, the more granular the metadata gets in the videos that are being distributed, the better we'll be able to target and create really great viewer experiences in combination with the advertiser. And so I think, you know, those kinds of trends. We're again in the early stages of that, and it's very exciting.
Those are things that, you know, heretofore we definitely did not see in the linear landscape.
Sure. And do you run into any issues around, you know, certain programs being highly desirable to advertise against, and then other programs being, you know, ones, advertisers want to steer clear from any inventory utilization issues around any of that?
You know, not really, for us because we are, we always take an audience-first based approach. It's, it's we're about, you know, packaging our audiences, and finding them wherever they may be. So we know, based on the data that we're surfacing, that an NFL user, for example, also views a lot of entertainment and news content. And so if Adidas wants to reach, an NFL fan, whether or not that NFL fan is consuming sports, obviously, we can, we can reach them there. But if they're also consuming comedies, and we can prove that to the marketer, you know, it's, it's less challenging for us. I don't know that I could say that for... You know, I remember my days in, in, linear television, and, that wasn't always the case.
So, packaging has always been a mainstay in the advertising industry, and I think, you know, the ability to do audience targeting has made it a lot more effective in streaming. It's really quite exciting. It's terrific.
And it sounds like there are quite a few advancements with the metrics for programmatic buying, but are there any more that you would like to call out in terms of just advertisers buying on programmatic for CTV that could influence that targeting, campaign performance on Fubo specifically?
You know, we are working with, data partners like LiveRamp, like TransUnion, and we can get very, very granular in terms of first- and third-party data. So I, I think that's kind of the, the nub of it. We've talked a little bit about that already. I, I think if you, if you look at CTV as, at its core, it, it really has enabled precise and precision-level, targeting for television, which heretofore has been a one-to-many medium, right? If you really wanna put them side by side, that's, that's really what it's all about.
And for Fubo, we were, you know, for example, always extolling the virtues of our addressable capabilities, and so we were ahead of, like, a Hulu or a YouTube TV when it came to dynamic ad insertion, but way before my time, I think it that goes back to 2018. So because we're in a logged-in environment, 100% addressable, we can do things like with our first-party data targeting contextually, behaviorally based on viewership, obviously demographic. And also just watching consumer behavior as they're journeying through our platform and understanding what they're consuming is incredibly important for packaging for marketers' goals.
And so, you know, what I always like to say, to bring it all together, is that if Nike came to us and said, "You know, Dina, we wanna reach women twenty-five to fifty-four who are left-handed golfers that live on the West Coast and watch cooking shows," we can absolutely help you find those audiences on Fubo with all these tools. And, I think that's the, that's the benefit. And, you know, again, generally speaking, most marketers understand that the more targeting that you do, the, the more the, the value goes up in the CPM, and they're willing to pay for that if there's, if there's less waste, which makes sense.
Absolutely. And if you could talk about the insights maybe that you've gained about the viewer behavior and preferences from the FAST channels. How are those insights shaping those strategies, your advertising strategies?
Yeah, I think we're approaching nearly 200 fast channels now across a wide array of programming, you know, entertainment and news. Of course, we have Fubo Sports Network as well. And what we've seen is that our fast viewership has really grown. I think the 2Q numbers, if I remember correctly, posted an increase of, like, 57% in hours viewed over the prior year, which is fantastic. But it's not. I don't know that it's necessarily a surprise, because we know and we like to say internally that, you know, people come for the sports, and they stay for the entertainment. And if you look at the profile of the Fubo subscriber, these are younger families, right?
Affluent families, so they like their sports, but they also want to watch their entertainment or news afterwards. Like I said before, if we know this, and we can share this with advertisers that, you know, people who watch the NFL also watch news, and by the way, they do. I think the numbers are upwards of 90%. So 90% of the people watching the NFL are watching entertainment programs and watching news programs, which is understandable. Users aren't unidimensional. We call that to marketers. We tell them, "This is following the consumer, so we can help you follow this consumer throughout the Fubo platform." That, the fast channels, just as I said before, because we're audience first, just kind of feed into that story and strategy.
We must hit on the political landscape beforehand. Obviously, we're close to the election, and we're also close to earnings, so we can't get too specific, of course, but I'm wondering if you could talk about how political advertising has an increased share of wallet on connected TV, and also, I wanna give you a chance to discuss how Fubo has just better targeting certainly than linear, but compare that to other connected TV options, and just what can Fubo do that linear can't in terms of political advertising and targeting?
Yes, I think it's to your first question, definitely increasing share of wallet. This goes back to our first-party data capabilities, for example, right? Those can't be replicated on linear TV. We have a lot of data that supports that in a lot of different ways. So again, we can use our first-party data to target subscribers by viewership by demographic region, so geo is obviously very, very important in a political season. We can get down to the zip code level, the DMA level. We can match our first-party data with an advertiser's first-party data for targeting, and of course, we do all of this in very privacy-centric ways.
And again, you can also match our first-party subscriber data to third-party data providers to do things like target political views or political parties and voting habits. So it does get very granular. And if you think about our regional sports capabilities and how deep we go there, that's definitely a strength because there have been parties who are targeting based, you know, on baseball games and key baseball games that are happening right now because they wanna be in front of that audience. They know they're a rapt audience. Also, our Latino audience is very, very strong, and that's a key constituency for both sides of the aisle. So these are the different ways that I think we're advantaged in CTV relative to linear.
Within CTV, having those RSNs sets you apart from a lot of other connected TV advertisers as well-
Yes. Thank you.
-it seems.
And we are out of time, unfortunately. So I would like to, just in case there's a lingering question from the audience, feel free to use the Q&A section to just shoot one in real quick if you do have one, and otherwise, we will have to wrap up here. So first of all, Dina, thank you so much for being with us today. Your insights are invaluable and very interesting, so thanks for sharing that with us today.
Again, thanks for having me. I really I enjoyed it.
Pleasure. All right, talk to you soon.
Thank you. Bye.