Thoughts

What Marketers Can Learn from Fantasy Football

NFL Players don’t care about your fantasy football teams. Just like everyone else.

But, maybe they should. At least those who consider themselves savvy marketers.

Working professionals and players alike—especially those that are planning for life after football—have something to learn from the 60+ million US & Canadian freaky football fanatics that call themselves “fantasy gurus.” I put myself in that category, and, as an ad man, I felt compelled to share the wealth with my fellow marketers. (If you’d like to challenge “guru” status, please kindly direct your attention to the wall of trophies.)

There’s a lot to learn from this niche hobby turned nationally competitive game. But let’s start at what we know about the life and business that is fantasy sports.

The business behind the bizarre, multibillion-dollar industry

For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on Fantasy Football because, same as the physical world, it is the most popular of the sports. It is also not necessary that you know how to play the game to take away the points made in this article. If you would like to learn, NY Times’ beginner’s guide to playing fantasy football can help.

Fantasy football is played by more Americans each year than the entire population of the UK, with spending that outranks the pet industry by billions with a ‘b.’ (Fantasy sports as a whole contributes to a $15+ billion market.)

Businesses and brands have taken notice of this sub-culture, and tailored their communications, marketing, and even products or services to appeal to this group (remember the number fifteen followed by nine zeros).

Even before the NFL’s regular season begins, energy starts to build and so do fantasy football-themed ads—some unavoidably funny, and others cringeworthy. Putting aside my creative opinion, each is doing its best (worst) to win the attention and trust of the fans, selling them everything from pizza to car insurance. Sometimes it feels like both.

Fantasy football is selling more than just pizza and car insurance

But fantasy has had an effect on more than just marketing. It’s created entirely new products, new businesses, and changed how many watch the game entirely. (There was even a show centered around it on FX.)

Unsurprisingly, the NFL stands to benefit most.

The league acknowledges that fantasy sports makes the game better. Fans who were once rooting for a single team are now cheering on individual players across multiple teams. That means more butts in seats, jersey sales, and game viewership.

The NFL invests mightily, making improvements everywhere from news and reporting—dedicated “Fantasy” platforms on the NFL Network are staffed with teams of writers—to stadiums, which are being equipped with lightning fast WiFi so fantasy players get player updates as soon as they happen.

Did you know: Ad spending between the two top-daily fantasy sports contest providers, Draft Kings and FanDuel, outspent the entire beer industry in 2016?

But what can we, as marketers, learn from this “fantasy?”

Today, the average fan spends about 8-9 hours a week and $653 per season, much of it dedicated to researching and leveraging data to build the perfect team. (At press, this writer logged 10 hours by mid-week). Player analysis, season stats, difficulty of schedule and match up, scoring projections, injury history, even weather at game time are taken into account.

This may be a surprise, but to be successful at fantasy football, it’s less about sports knowledge and more about having a strategic mind. One only needs a basic understanding of how the game is played.

Not unlike marketers, a savvy fantasy owner must mine endless fields of data, look for the right insights, and question which measurements matter to make an informed decision about a player to build their perfect team.

Fantasy for Marketers 101:

1. Understanding the Data

Information about a particular player, team schedule, or even local weather is mostly free and accessible to all. There are endless pages of analysis and “expert” opinions that, if an attempt to read it all was made, would literally make your head explode.

Understanding all the data you have at your disposal helps save time when making decisions. Don’t let information FOMO consume you. Know what you’re looking for. When you find it, make sure you understand it and have an idea what to do with it. Now, dive in.

2. Mining for Insights

When reading and reviewing the data, go deeper than just surface level. Look past player ranking, historical performance, match-up probability. Look for correlations, overall patterns, differences between data sets, surprises (what happened, what didn’t counter to expectations), and any interesting conclusions.

If on paper, the point projections tell you JuJu Smith-Schuster is your solution to a week’s match-up, investigate the data that’s steering you to that conclusion and ask “why.”

All too often, in marketing and fantasy, we see people jumping quickly to a conclusion based on information presented. But data are just facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis. They’re unavoidable, stubborn, and stupid. They don’t tell you what to do.

3. A Lesson in Economics

Economics is a powerful social science because, not only is it applied to economic issues, it explains how the world around us works.

While I practiced and honed my own fantasy football skills over the years, I hadn’t realized that in the process I was practicing and applying many economic principles.

Some examples:

• Opportunity cost (the fantasy football draft or swapping players during season play)
• Comparative advantage and gains (trading players to fill a position need)
• Market behavior including supply and demand shocks (injury, Bye Weeks)
• Consumer surplus (again, the draft)
• Imperfectly competitive markets (fantasy “super team” rosters)
• Game theory (analysis of player value in draft or trade)
• More here

The same case can be made for economic principles in marketing because the very fundamentals of marketing are based in economics. These principles above are based on more logical assumptions, but take into account the analysis that applies psychological insights into human behavior to explain how choice happens. That is behavioral economics. As marketers, we use these principles to better understand the consumer psyche and the irrationality of the human decision-making process. All to ultimately create a closer relationship between a company and its customer.

4. Having A Vision

Having a long-term goal or vision for the “perfect team” is important for a successful draft but also management of a team throughout a season, which is sure to be filled with surprises.

Every season, fantasy newbies and vets alike will draft using a very systematic approach. That is, following a fixed plug-n-play template filling the player positions based on gaps in a starting lineup vs. picking players based on team value.

These managers are also susceptible to chasing the trends of a draft, buying a player for more than he’s worth or leaving a player position completely vacant.

Same goes for brands. Having a vision, or what we like to call our “true North Star,” allows us to make more focused and informed decisions even in the face of a competitive and changing marketplace–not being reactive to external or even internal pressures, all aligning to a single long-term goal.

The ebbs and flows of a fantasy football season are not unlike the world in which brands live.

Having a vision, or what we like to call our “true North Star,” allows us to make more focused and informed decisions even in the face of a competitive and changing marketplace.

In conclusion

Like with fantasy football, marketing is science–only with flesh and blood.

Fantasy Football isn’t just a game, it’s an incubator for human activity and behavior. There are many universes like it, and they happen all around us. We encourage you to be a student of people. Take note of the different interactions and transformative experiences. Study those observations, conversations, and correlations, and remember your customers are human beings.

Consumers aren’t just numbers on a page and facts alone won’t persuade them. They’re dynamic and complex. The understanding of how and why consumers make choices must change with them.

• Fantasy Football
• NFL
• Strategy

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