Fubo is a streaming service that continues to be an unexpected survivor in the Streaming Wars. While not the biggest player in the game, Fubo competes with YouTube TV, Hulu and other well-funded streaming services through a healthy lineup of live sports and innovative features. With regards to marketing and subscription growth, Fubo makes up for its lack of budget and branding by strategically utilizing benefit-forward creative in cost-effective acquisition channels.
Client
Fubo
Year
2018
Video Ads
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Initially, the senior team was not a fan of this video. They literally walked around Midtown getting reactions and, after receiving only positive feedback, hesitantly ran the ad. This video would go on to be a huge success, and it completely changed our strategy around video ads.
Storyboarding
Video Highlight
After a successful run from the YouTube buffer above, we started doing more acquisition-focused video. We added a dedicated video editor to the team and made TV a part of our marketing buys. Six years and three editors later, my ad above is still the primary template/inspiration used for almost every video piece.
Fubo Fact
When I joined the company in Q2 of 2018, there were only 139,263 paying subscribers. As of Q4 of 2023, that total has skyrocketed to over 1.6 million. While I alone can’t take credit for all that growth, as the only marketing copywriter who has contributed to every sector of the business, I take great pride in what we’ve achieved as a company.
Paid Social Ads
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When we started doing TikTok ads, I literally had no experience with the format. I didn’t even have the app on my phone. After falling into a bit of doom scrolling, we came up with an influencer-style ad that was so popular, my video editor was getting recognized in public.
Finding Fubo’s Style
Prior to 2020, Fubo paid social ads were either a logo soup or a partner's key art. That changed when we started doing more video. I wrote the scripts and storyboarded the cuts, and my editors would film and edit them. To avoid fatigue, we reworked the ads every quarter by experimenting with new styles, product features, channels, sports and content highlights.
A Plan for Latino
I do not speak fluent Spanish, so it’s important for me to work closely with my art director, who is a native speaker. I’ve always strived to write clear copy for the Latino community that’s not inappropriate or cheesy, especially as we started using more Spanglish. Overall, we’ve been able to grow our subscriber count from 15k in October 2018 to over 200k today.
App Store Optimization
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All of the Fubo app store profiles get regular updates to help maintain optimization around shifting seasonality. Some app stores, like Apple’s, offer more compelling visual elements like the live-in app events. For iOS, we improved our impression-to-install conversion from 19% in Q1 & Q2 of 2023 to 24% in Q1 & Q2 of 2024.
Always Be Optimizing
I’m constantly working with a senior marketing director to stay up to date on the latest keywords and algorithm changes affecting the different app stores. We’re always striving to lower our acquisition costs, so maintaining the app store profiles with optimized strategies has been huge in getting us excellent visibility in the marketplace and, ultimately, free subscribers through organic downloads.
Email Strategy
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I always step up to collaborate on new ideas with my marketing team. For this project, I worked directly with my email manager to revamp our abandon cart emails. We created four unique concepts to send out as a journey. Targeting leads who fell out of the sales funnel, this journey has led to a +51% subscription start rate in Canada and +8% trial start rate in the U.S.
“I need you to do more than just write copy .”
— VP, Creative
Fubo Fact
“Always be testing” is a big part of Fubo’s marketing mindset, and we’re always putting new creatives to the test across as many channels as we can. For these partnership emails, my designer and I found inspiration from our baseball newsletter layout and wanted to redesign it as an acquisition email. This particular test nearly tripled our clicks, improving the CTR from 1.48% to 4.36%, from Mariners’ season ticket members.
Connected TV Ads
SEO Landing Pages
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We hired a company named Graphite to improve our reputation through organic search. The bulk of the deliverables were easy executions using templates and A.I. However, the competitor pages were different and required in-depth knowledge of our product, continuous scouting of our competitors and experience writing longform copy with keywords. I wrote and populated charts for 6 different comparison pages. You can find the other pages here.