Fubo’s Dina Roman on how women’s sports are propelling its March Madness strategy this year

Traditionally, March Madness meant hoops fans tuning into the NCAA men’s tournament. But in recent years, the women’s tournament is just as buzzworthy — and is proving to be a major draw. The sports-centric streaming platform Fubo is seizing the opportunity, streaming every game of the women’s tournament — which began on March 19 and wraps up with the championship game on April 6.

As a proof point of this excitement, ad sales for ESPN were up 132% for the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament compared to last year.

That’s welcome news for Dina Roman, Fubo’s SVP of global ad sales, who notes that “sports are one of the few remaining types of content that are primarily watched live and are part of the cultural zeitgeist.”

In a conversation with The Current, Roman also discussed Fubo’s recent ad innovations — including interactive CTV ad formats — and how the platform’s addressable audience helps deliver better ad experiences.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

With Fubo being a live sports-centric service, what kind of opportunities does that present for advertising compared to other platforms in terms of ad experience?

Sports are one of the few remaining types of content that are primarily watched live and are part of the cultural zeitgeist. Sports drive appointment viewing and a broader sense of community and fandom, which creates an ability to reach strategic target audiences around key events. It’s also content that lends itself to interactive ad formats that can further contextualize the viewer experience with polls, statistics and athlete tie-ins.

It’s a trifecta: live, targeted audiences who engage. We see this play out in terms of audience ad engagement on our platform. Male viewers aged 25-54 are 43% more likely to engage with an advertiser after seeing an ad on Fubo compared to the average engagement rate across OTT and linear [according to an Edo analysis provided to Fubo].

Is Fubo capitalizing on March Madness any different this year as far as user experience goes, and how might advertising innovations be playing a role?

Fubo will stream all women’s and select men’s matchups from the 2025 NCAA Tournament including the Final Four and National Championships. All March Madness games will be prominently featured in a dedicated basketball hub on Fubo’s platform. Brands have an opportunity to sponsor the hub with a clickable feature logo placement, banners and custom design elements. Brands can also tap into high-impact non-video ad units across Fubo’s interface such as pause ads.

Beyond sports, what in your mind makes for an overall quality ad experience, both for consumers and for advertisers?

We know Fubo’s audience is highly attentive and engaged through the work we’ve been doing with measurement partners like TVision, EDO and our internal analysis of the consumer journey across our platform. We understand viewing habits — what our audience is watching, when, where and for how long. In privacy-safe ways, we share as much information about audience viewing habits with our advertisers as possible, whether we’re transacting on a direct or programmatic basis. That’s because if the viewer feels the content on our platform (including ads), is relevant to them, then everyone wins.

Fubo can do all this, because we operate in a logged-in subscription environment. Our audience is 100% addressable and our first-party data enables us to reach audiences using contextual, behavioral, viewership and demographic targeting across our entire lineup of sports, news and entertainment content. We’re analyzing the content audiences are watching, their demographics, purchasing behavior and more to create a personalized ad experience anywhere on our platform across any device where they watch Fubo. This also enables advertisers to apply precision targeting that creates an overall better ad experience for the consumer that we share across all aspects of their campaigns.

What has Fubo done in the last year to improve the ad experience for those two parties?

Ad innovation in CTV has leveled up what’s possible in terms of creating engaging and relevant ad experiences on the big screen. Specifically, deploying unified identifiers, standardizing metadata and interactive ads are just three areas that make streaming so distinctive from linear. We’re very excited about the ad market’s response to our interactive ads. Across streaming platforms, interactive ads have increased brand awareness by 33% and purchase intent by 47% compared to standard video ads, [according to an internal study conducted by Lucid].

Knowing that interactivity drives audience ad engagement, we launched an entire suite of interactive CTV ad formats including transactional and gamified ads, as well as pause ads which have gleaned exciting results so far. We’ve seen that when pause ads are layered onto a CTV video campaign the likelihood of engaging with a brand is even higher.

What steps do you think, generally, the larger industry could take to improve ad experience, from SVODs to FAST to MVPDs? What is being done right and what could be improved?

If we are truly striving for the right ad, right place and right audience on an omnichannel basis, the industry needs to accelerate standards across transparent data and formats, from pre- and post-campaign measurement to developing AI guidelines and more.

Consumer access to content has become exceedingly fragmented and atomized. This affects all aspects of the media ecosystem, such as how we measure success.

But progress has been made toward adopting valuable metrics like ad attention and engagement. According to Advertiser Perceptions, 60% of marketers used a Nielsen alternative last year. So, it’s OK to embrace change when you understand the need. Increasingly, marketers want to ensure their ads are being seen and viewers are taking action. With broader adoption, new types of engagement and attention signals can be used as proxies for consumer focus on advertising messages across streaming platforms.

Separately, AI will continue to influence marketing and advertising across the board, including predictive analytics to improve targeting and programmatic advertising solutions that automate the creation and placement of personalized ads. AI applications can be geared toward enhancing the advertiser and consumer connection in near real time on an omnichannel basis as much as they can be used to improve yield and revenue performance.