Scoring Big: Winning Over a Distracted and Fragmented Fandom
Today, fandom isn’t found exclusively in front of a television. It’s a moving target that flows from the broadcast to creator highlights, and from betting apps to the stadium. The days of securing reach through a single broadcast buy are gone. Capturing modern fandom now requires a strategy built for fragmentation, velocity, and constant switching.
This shift has been building for years, but we’ve reached a critical point as live sports have migrated over to streaming ecosystems defined by exclusivity and fragmentation. A single NFL game can exist across multiple distinct feeds on YouTube TV, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock and the screens inside sports bars. The pattern repeats across leagues: MLS has consolidated inside Apple TV. College sports stretch across Disney, Fox, CBS, YouTube and regional networks. Soccer demands an entire subscription mosaic.
If you add on the highlight economy (creator reactions, watch-alongs, betting apps, alternative audio feeds and real-time social commentary), the ecosystem becomes even more complex. Fans don’t just watch a game; they surround it.
In this environment, no single media partner can credibly claim universal reach. That might appear to be an advertising challenge, but for performance-driven marketers it is an opportunity. What looks like fragmentation is actually a force multiplier. The number of places where fans express their passion has grown exponentially, creating far more precise entry points for brands to meet them. The goal is not to recreate the scale of the linear era. It is to build a flexible media strategy that follows fans as they move across platforms, moments, and mindsets.
Taming wild territory
Live sports have become the gravitational pole of the streaming business. They drive subscriber growth, fuel ad-supported tiers, and shape platform loyalty in ways no other content can. But this rapid rise has outpaced the industry’s ability to manage how sports are bought and sold. What used to be a single media investment is now a negotiation across rights agreements, device environments, walled gardens, and measurement systems that rarely speak the same language.
Everyone wants a piece of the sports surge. Publishers want more sports dollars. DSPs want more access. Broadcasters want more exclusivity. And agencies, squarely in the middle, are expected to bring order to the chaos. They must make sense of a fragmented landscape so brands can tell a coherent performance story. It’s not glamorous work, but it creates tremendous value.
This is why many agencies are consolidating their DSP portfolios. Too many systems create too much noise, whether it is conflicting reporting, competing identity frameworks or uneven access to sports inventory. By narrowing their toolset, agencies gain depth over breadth: cleaner measurement, tighter frequency control, stronger negotiating leverage and faster activation. Sports is not just a premium content category. It will be a premium digital performance category. And it increasingly rewards specialization over ubiquity.
A nuanced approach to fandom
To succeed in this environment, fandom should be viewed as a cultural signal rather than a media segment. A fan is not defined by where they watch the game; they’re defined by how they carry that passion across the week. Someone might start with an NFL game on YouTube TV, flip to TikTok highlights seconds later, trade reactions in a group chat at halftime, place a micro-bet on a fourth-quarter drive, and end up on Discord or Reddit parsing commentary from three different angles.
The fan journey is now a chain of interconnected micro-moments, each charged with emotion and intent. Those moments are where brands earn attention, and where the line between content and community collapses. Sports fandom has become a live, layered social experience that moves across apps, screens and conversations.
These bursts of attention no longer happen only inside the live feed. They erupt in reactions, controversies, highlight edits, fantasy updates, injuries, trade rumors, and meme culture. In many cases, the second screen drives the first, especially for digital-native viewers who see the swirl of talk, text, betting, and social interpretation as part of the entertainment rather than something adjacent to it.
The distraction opportunity
For years, second-screen behavior was treated as a threat because it pulled attention away from the main event. But, fans do not simply watch sports. They assemble their own experience by toggling from one sports-related surface to another. Distraction and fragmentation are not dilution. They are accelerants.
Brands that recognize this shift can meet fans in their most emotionally charged moments. They can respond to highlight velocity, tailor creative to the rhythm of fan behavior, and activate in real time when attention spikes rather than waiting for the next scheduled placement.
This is the distraction opportunity: what was once seen as fractured attention is now a measurable, high-intent engagement layer that linear television never offered.
What it takes to win fan attention now
The brands and agencies that succeed in sports moving forward share a common approach: they embrace the fragmentation, and they build systems designed to travel with the fan. They don’t anchor planning to a single source of truth, because there isn’t one. They anchor planning to fan behavior itself.
Meeting the fan in the moment requires readiness that extends beyond media buying. Agencies need a coherent view of identity across channels, even when deterministic data is limited. They need measurement frameworks capable of stitching together fragmented signals into something coherent. And they need creative and activation strategies calibrated to rapid attention shifts.
The agencies making real progress are the ones building internal sports playbooks inside their DSPs and cloud environments. These frameworks merge publisher relationships, moment-based triggers, multi-surface targeting and a measurement layer that turns chaos into insight. They are not waiting for an industry standard. They are creating one.
Approaching FAST
As subscription fatigue grows, fans are increasingly consuming sports-adjacent content (highlights, commentary, studio analysis) on FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) channels. With this shift comes a transformation. FAST is becoming the new sports cable. It is inexpensive, accessible and filled with sports-oriented content, and fans treat it as a companion to premium sports viewing.
The challenge is that FAST remains a black box for many marketers. Inventory quality varies widely, content adjacency is inconsistent, and reporting practices lag behind premium streaming. But for agencies willing to learn these environments, FAST represents one of the biggest opportunities moving forward. It’s where incremental reach will come from, where cost efficiency is highest, and it’s where performance-minded brands can build presence without battling the price inflation of premium live sports.
Turning FAST from a black box into a performance channel requires the same discipline that now defines CTV maturity: transparent measurement, repeatable modeling and the ability to interpret imperfect data with confidence. Agencies that build this competency early will own the next wave of sports attention.
Looking ahead
The convergence of streaming, identity and fan behavior is pushing sports deeper into the programmatic universe. What was once a legacy TV buy is now an omnichannel ecosystem that spans CTV, mobile, OOH, social and gaming.
In this environment, fandom is identity. Distraction is signal. Attention is a moving target. Sports is the rare content where that moving target can still be captured, provided agencies build the muscle to follow it.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Adswerve. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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