Inside FanDuel’s and DraftKings' new TV ad strategies for NFL
Daniel Roberts
At this time one year ago, DraftKings and FanDuel, the leaders in the burgeoning “daily” segment of the fantasy sports industry, were just beginning to roll out a multi-platform advertising assault. Neither company knew that their ads would spark a contentious, nine-month storm of legal scrutiny and negative headlines.
The two privately held “unicorn” startups spent more than $200 million combined on TV ads during last NFL season (DraftKings spent $80 million in just the first week), and it showed. There was no escape from the ads, if you watched any sports at all. And while the marketing flood succeeded in getting their brand names out there, it also arguably attracted the unwanted attention of lawmakers, and inarguably annoyed many, many people.
FanDuel’s five new TV ad spots, shared early with Yahoo Finance, feature a single actor and a single buzzword. Pooch Hall, currently a supporting star on Showtime’s “Ray Donovan” and set to play Muhammad Ali in the upcoming film “The Bleeder,” stars in the ads, and concludes each one by inviting users to, “be sportsrich.” The ads begin airing nationally on Labor Day (but showed up during the New York Jets preseason game on Thursday, because the Jets are a FanDuel partner).
The ads show Hall in various football settings, like on the field, in the locker room, or in an ice bath, and he emphasizes the fun of beating your friends on FanDuel. “Steve beats me one week—then I beat Steve the next week, with Steve’s quarterback,” Hall narrates in one.
Dan Spiegel, FanDuel’s head of brand, says the company considered a number of new spokespeople, both famous and not. “We felt Pooch really captured the tone we were going for,” he says, “which was confident but not cocky, cool but not too cool, and also he’s a guy that you can believe belongs in a sports context.” Hall played a quarterback on the popular BET show “The Game,” which ended its run in 2015, and he played high school football in Massachusetts.
No other celebrities or actors will appear in FanDuel’s ads this season; Pooch Hall, for now, will be the marketing face of the company, like the actor Dean Winters (“Mayhem”) for Allstate or JK Simmons for Farmers Insurance.
‘Sportsrich’ is not about money, FanDuel says
FanDuel’s new ads are all part of a larger rebrand that the company announced in August, including a new logo and design aesthetic on its desktop site and mobile app. At that time, the company posted a promotional video introducing the “sportsrich” theme, but now it will push that more overtly.
The idea is to move on from last season’s messaging—which was mostly on how to play and how much money you can win—and stress the fun of the game instead. “We looked at that messaging and we said, given the level of awareness people now have, it’s not as important anymore to educate people on how the product works, but on the benefit,” Spiegel says. “So, is the benefit the money, or the feeling and the strategy and the fun?”
Many might argue the benefit is the money.
Is there a contradiction in selecting a phrase that contains “rich” for an effort to depart from the idea of money? Spiegel says, “Definitely that’s something we thought a lot about. Are we sending the wrong message out there? But the notion of being something-rich is an increasingly popular colloquialism.” He says a recent American Express ad starring Tina Fey, in which she buys a lot of shrimp at a grocery store and says, “I’m so shrimp rich,” inspired him. “That gave us confidence that even though it has the word ‘rich,’ it’s not about money.”
Nonetheless, cynics and critics—and daily fantasy sports has many—may still argue that the company is emphasizing the appeal of winning money.
FanDuel’s new ads also highlight new social-oriented features like Friends Mode, which lets friends play each other in closed, recurring leagues that mimic the format of traditional season-long fantasy sports. DraftKings and Yahoo have announced similar features that put daily fantasy drafts into an all-season format.
Last season, both FanDuel and DraftKings ran spots showing “regular guys” playing and winning money. FanDuel stuck with that approach, but DraftKings shifted its ads, a few weeks into the season, to a celebrity plug, using the voice of actor Ed Norton.
For its TV ads this season, DraftKings is using NFL players as the celebrities. In two new spots, a “regular guy” is paired up with the star that he drafted: in these cases, DeAndre Hopkins of the Houston Texans and Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots. In the spots, the players praise the regular guy for their success. DraftKings released the ads online last month, and DraftKings, too, will be running its ads far less often, the company says.
“Last season… we were acquiring more people on some days than we did the entire month of September the prior year,” CEO Jason Robins told Yahoo Finance in June. “I don’t think that will happen again because we won’t be spending as much on advertising… We will do some, so I expect we’ll have another nice growth spurt, but I don’t expect that you’ll see the same outpouring of ads that you saw, and probably we’ll see customer acquisition be a little bit lower for that reason.” DraftKings’ new CMO Janet Holian, hired in January, acknowledged that last season, DraftKings “could have reduced the ads a bit.”
In addition to running a lower total volume of ads, both companies will somewhat de-emphasize certain types of advertising, whereas last year the ads for both blanketed every medium: television, radio, print, and even physical signage in certain cities. “Every channel brings different value,” says Spiegel. “And I’m obviously not giving away company secrets when I say Facebook is really valuable for us, the ability to target so closely. A lot of our guys are sitting on their couch, phones in their hand, watching pregame talk, so we found mobile is a great place to reach our guys.”
With the legal threat that hung over the industry now somewhat dissipating, all of the daily fantasy companies are seeking to reach those same guys. All of them want to convince those guys that they can get “sportsrich.”
—
Disclaimer: Yahoo, which offers a daily fantasy sports product, is the parent company of Yahoo Finance.
Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.Sportsbook is our recurring sports business video series.
