Did anyone else watch “The League” on FX? One of the most underrated shows on television, it’s also responsible for most of what I know about fantasy football, which admittedly leaves some gaps.
There’s an episode where the guys go to Las Vegas for their fantasy draft and set up in a cabana with a whiteboard, drinks, and the level of seriousness normally reserved for hostage negotiations. I remember watching it and thinking this is objectively ridiculous, while also completely understanding why a group of friends would want to do it every single year.
Draft Nation at Circa had that energy, except on steroids.
I went to one of the events in August and they had fully committed to the bit: fantasy drafts everywhere, a five-hour Stadium Swim takeover, athletes, celebrities, fantasy experts, competitions, parties, and more than 100 live drafts over the weekend. There was even a Fantasy FootBALL Gala with jerseys as the suggested attire, which is possibly the first gala dress code men have been preparing for their entire lives.
The best part was nobody had to convince these people to care.
Fantasy football players have been taking draft day absurdly seriously for decades, traveling for it, commissioning trophies, inventing punishments, and developing traditions that somehow become more binding than most family agreements. They also have league group chats that I assume become inadmissible in court sometime around Week 4.
Rick Wolf knows this better than most. He started his own fantasy league back in 1991, when fantasy football had roughly 500,000 players. Today, more than 60 million Americans play.
Wolf, along with Ed Bunnell, Ian Ritchie, and Bill Enright, founded Fantasy Sports Entertainment & Productions and put some structure around something fantasy players had already been celebrating for years.
August 21 is now National Fantasy Football Draft Day.
And because getting a day on the calendar would apparently be showing tremendous restraint, they also created Draft Nation and threw the inaugural celebration at Circa.
Honestly, fair.
There were already 60 million people at the party
Joanna Gingold was brought onto Draft Nation as a contractor to sell sponsorships and she didn’t exactly get the luxury of a long runway. It was a brand-new event, which meant she couldn’t walk into meetings with five years of attendance data and a beautiful slide showing sponsor retention.
“I wasn’t selling brands on a track record,” she told me. “I was selling them on the audience and the idea.”
That audience is a pretty good place to start.
Fantasy football players are already researching players, watching games, listening to podcasts, spending money, and arguing with people they’ve known since college about teams they manage from their phones.
“Draft Nation wasn’t trying to create that community,” Gingold said. “It was giving it a much bigger way to come together.”
We spend a lot of time in marketing trying to create engagement when sometimes the engagement is already sitting right in front of us.
Gaming has plenty of its own examples. Football weekends, March Madness brackets, Derby parties, long Vegas weekends, poker nights, and annual trips with the same friends who have somehow been eating at the same steakhouse for 15 years. You don’t have to teach those people to care. You have to figure out where your brand makes sense.
You still have to bring something
Of course, an enthusiastic audience doesn’t mean every brand should immediately run toward it holding a banner.
Gingold brought in sponsors from several categories, including MIKE’S HARDER, Bud Light, Ghost Energy, Ace of Spades, and gaming companies. Her existing relationships helped get conversations started quickly, but she said that alone wasn’t enough.
“You still need relevance, the right brand, the right audience, and an actual idea,” she said. “It’s a whole lot easier to get a deal done when you can show a brand what it could own and why it makes sense for its business.”
I like “what it could own,” because that’s a very different conversation than “where can we fit the logo?”
We’re exceptionally talented at finding places for logos in this industry. Walls. Screens. Lanyards. Step-and-repeats. Cocktail napkins. If there’s an unbranded six-inch surface anywhere near a gaming conference, someone from sales is probably already looking for the rate card.
Gingold has a much better test.
“If you remove the logo and people still want the experience, you probably have strong integration. If the logo is the whole idea, you don’t.”
There you go. That’s the whole meeting.
They were going to do this anyway
Nobody needed to discover that fantasy football fans enjoy Las Vegas. I believe Las Vegas has previously encountered sports fans. These leagues were already drafting and traveling together, spending money, and turning draft day into an annual event. Draft Nation simply gave them a much bigger version of something they were already doing and gave brands a way to be part of it without having to invent the reason everyone showed up.
