Time to get over sports event sponsorships; try fantasy games

Sports event sponsorships by big brands is not new. Barclays has been the title sponsor for the British Premier League for years; Santander for La Liga; Vivo has retained title sponsorship for Indian Premier League for 2018. In addition, there are numerous sponsors for specific matches, trophies and events. Sports events and sports news have now found a whole new way to engage their audience - fantasy sports. Not surprisingly, they do get good sponsorship for their respective fantasy leagues too. Afterall, fantasy sports have proved to be more engaging and entertaining than all other online avenues, and they have grown in popularity among all the demographics.

Check out the growth of fantasy sports below:

/ Fantasy sports have found 75% growth in the teen population of USA
/ Since 2013, total number of female fantasy sports players has increased by nearly 6.8 million, 2 million more than the new male fantasy players

That’s the reason SkySports found Gillette and Telegraph found Dove and Office365 as sponsors for their fantasy leagues.

How do sports sponsorships help brands/companies?

/ Brand awareness: because sporting events attract millions of fans.
/ Repositioning: because brands wish to associate the euphoria of sports with their names.
/ Cause alignment: because sporting events allow the brands to align a mission or a purpose with their products.

The habits of millennials and Gen-Z users

As the reach of internet keeps on growing, so does the time spent on it by the users. In this sense, it is a self-expanding universe on its own. Millennials spend around 33% of their personal time in front of screens, compared to 41% spent by people aged 35+. Out of the 33%, millennials report spending most of this time(about 20% in all) online, compared to 9% spend by people older than 35 years. It is clear that if you want to reach the younger audience, internet is the way to go, not television. Sports events are unique in this respect, as they provide a universal platform to reach everyone.

Why not fantasy sports app instead of sponsorships?

Well-designed fantasy sports software also gives the added advantage of more readership to the news sources. Online surveys report that 60% fantasy sports players say they read more about sports because of fantasy games. It’s a win-win for the sponsor too, as the more the audience spend time on the platform, the more they get to interact with them. But sponsorships alone don’t give these brands the kind of visibility they are looking for.

Why fantasy sports app is better than sponsorship?

Recently, Google launched their own UPI(Unified Payment Interface) in India, and to promote it, they came up with the idea of scratch cards. User gets a scratch card for every payment made using Tez, the scratch card may result in some small win for the user. For a payment of more than 500, user gets a scratch card which gets active on Friday, and the winning amount is Rs 100000 for the lucky users. Now these scratch cards, weekly lottery are the most primitive form of fantasy sports. Despite many UPI apps already present in the market, Google was able to capture quite a large share of the market, and the number keeps on growing. That, is the power of fantasy sports. No matter your product or your target consumer, with a properly designed fantasy sport in your campaign, you can increase the chances of making consumer engagement a reality for your brand.

Google is not the first brand to use sports to increase their user engagement and user count. Nor will it be the last. Brands have been spending their marketing budget to sponsor sporting events and fantasy sports games to reach their customers. Now imagine if these brands start to use the tricks and techniques of fantasy games into luring customers.

If brands, who sponsor sporting events, decide to create their own fantasy sports games, here’s how they can benefit -

Point redemption/cashback on products

Cashback, a popular method to get customers to visit again, is an idea that can be used by the brands in their fantasy leagues. For example, products will have points which can be redeemed in the platform. Associate games and events can be held without worrying about the sponsorship costs once the platform is implemented. This will also save the re-marketing cost and efforts for the brands.

Associate games with events without sponsorship costs

Marketing gurus have been using this idea cleverly since ages. For the 1999 cricket world cup, Pepsi was the official sponsor, but the most memorable brand promotion built around it was from Britannia. Remember “Britannia khao, world cup jao”, different Britannia products had different points(runs). For every century scored by the user, they got a booklet about cricket facts, and a scratch card. The booklet itself was a great collectible item for kids and the youth and Britannia got themselves consumers who had broken their relationship with Parle-G for the first time ever. A nicely designed campaign to promote your fantasy league built around cricket works best when you place it around the actual events(World Cup, IPL etc).

Remarketing costs are saved

With a fantasy app in your portfolio, you don’t have to go around paying for placing advertisements for users who visited your website but did not make a purchase. The users will come back for to the app for participating in the fantasy sports and you can promote your products from your app itself. Better yet, you can promote other products and get paid for it as well.

Vinfotech can help you get a win-win

Vinfotech, the world leader in fantasy sports website design and development, can help you with finding the answers for the above questions.
/ Vinfotech can also help you in targeting specific users with specific advertisements and products. We can help you design a league where different placeholders will showcase different products from you. Thus ensuring that the popularity of the sport is utilized in building a league based on your products.
/ Players aspiring to be on the leaderboards will get more and more involved with your product and the leaderboards of the league can be designed around the products itself.

vFantasy, Vinfotech’s fantasy sports software, is the proven world leader when it comes to frameworks for building fantasy sports website and mobile applications. It has delivered hundreds of successful projects, and is built on thousands of hours of coding and continuous enhancement. We also help our customers in getting the initial users and in scaling the product to accommodate the expanding user-base.

Want to create the next big sport event? Give us a call.