Darren Herman

If you didn’t know, I’m a huge sports
fan.  My primary sport is hockey with the New Jersey Devils being my
#1 team.  After hockey, I’m a fan of [in no particular order]
baseball (New York Yankees), tennis, basketball (New York Knicks),
and football (New York Giants).  When I can find the time to watch
sport on television or take the Subway to Yankee Stadium, I enjoy
every moment of the game. 

Over the past decade, marketers have
found multiple avenues of reaching sports fans; and one major avenue
that has garnered significant attention recently is that of fantasy
sports.  In the past two weeks, Advertising Age and CNN have written
articles on this $1.5 billion dollar industry that has been growing
at seven-percent per year over the past three years.  While naming
rights on sports stadiums may be few and far between (fixed number of
stadiums and lengthy contracts) and ad-space during national
broadcasts of games are selling like video game consoles on release
dates,   fantasy sports which were once an underground cult following
of Miller Light drinking frat boys who spent Sunday afternoon glued
to the couch is now mainstream and attracting significant dollars
both from league fees and from marketers.

According to the Fantasy Sports Trade
Association, there are between 15-18 million registered fantasy
sports fans playing on major media companies fantasy sports services.
The leader of the fantasy sports services is Yahoo with double the
fantasy sports traffic than last year’s second place finisher, ESPN.
CBS Sportsline and Fox also have leagues that are highly popular
amongst the fantasy sports crowd.

Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square
Ventures and friend of mine, was one of the first folks to use the
term “freemiumâ€? in public usage.  The term describes a business
model that is free for a portion of services but if you want the full
service, you pay a fee (thus, premium).  Yahoo and many of the sports
leagues are participating in this freemium business model as they
allow for free sign-up of a basic service and for additional dollars,
you can add real-time scoring, scouting reports about individual
players and other enhancing and enticing services that would give you
a leg-up to the competition.

With over $1.5 billion coming from the
pockets of the fantasy sports consumers (average age of 36 years old,
male, married, high income bracket, and 3.8 hours per week of
managing their team), you have to assume marketers are jumping on the
bandwaggon.  And yes, they are.  Seven figure sponsorships of leagues
are now common with even the smallest sponsorship packages in the
mid-six figures.  GMC, Samsung, DirecTV and Visa are all active
sponsors for some of the fantasy sports leagues and are spending
quite a bit to reach these affluent males.  Coca-Cola isn’t
sponsoring a league per se, but they are sponsoring the fantasy
football news and columns (ESPN).

In recent weeks, Major League Baseball
tried dipping their toes in the fantasy market by demanding that
fantasy sports leagues pay a licensing fees to utilize the stats of
their players.  In a court ruling, MLB was denied this licensing fee
as fantasy sports leagues have the right to utilize this public
information for free. 

Now that we have all the information
surrounding fantasy sports, I’d like to chime in from a marketers
point of view.  Fantasy sports are a fantastic way to reach your 30
year old male who is in a very high income bracket.  The reasons for
this is are high level of engagement with continually updating
content,  increased attention span as the season moves deeper,
community aspects of social networking if said league has deployed
this service, and a brand affinity play to synch up with a sports
league if you aren’t a major title sponsor of the league (such as
MLB, NFL, NHL, etc).  I had been reading quite a bit about fantasy
sports and know that all of my buddies drafts are coming up for the
upcoming NFL season.  Get ready corporate America – we’re about to
lose 30 minutes to 1 hour of time in the office on Fridays during the
football season as people get their deals and lineups done for the
Sunday and Monday games.

Tags:  fantasy sports, NFL, gaming, advertising