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Rob Gronkowski wants another shot at Super Bowl glory, and both FanDuel and Wieden+Kennedy are more than happy to give it to him.
The former National Football League tight end isn’t looking for another Super Bowl ring to add to the three he won with the New England Patriots and the one he took home as a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. For Super Bowl 58, he just wants to make another attempt at the “Kick of Destiny” that 25-mile-per-hour winds pushed wide left during his last Super Bowl campaign with FanDuel and Wieden in Arizona last year.
“Literally, as he missed it, he’s on the ground …’Andrew, you’ve got to let me do this again,’” said Andrew Sneyd, FanDuel’s evp of marketing.
FanDuel handed out $10 million in bonus wagers to customers who placed wagers on its Sportsbook app before Gronkowski’s attempt. But the returns on that spend and the $6 million to $7 million cost of a 30-second ad on Fox last year made it easier to justify giving Gronkowski another chance in 2024.
On the front end, FanDuel saw a 10% increase in brand awareness from more than 14 billion impressions. Its 23% share of voice during its portion of the Super Bowl exceeded both Pepsi (4%) and Mars Wrigley’s M&M brand (18%), and was overshadowed only by Frito-Lay’s Doritos (24%) and Anheuser-Busch InBev (31%).
In more solid results, however, FanDuel averaged 2 million active users at 50,000 bets per minute for roughly 17 million total bets. Of the new online bettors available during last year’s Big Game, FanDuel grabbed 70% of them. As more states allow sports betting and online gaming continues to grow, sportsbooks like FanDuel are more likely to stick with a winning game plan in Big Game marketing situations—even in Las Vegas.
“We tried to stay true to what really matters: There’s over 100 million eyeballs that are going to be watching the Super Bowl and there’s a lot more people that live outside of Nevada than live in it,” Sneyd said. “The geography that matters to us is the phone that’s in their pocket, and that they’re in a state where they’re able to participate as a customer with us.”
Betting on growth
Currently, 35 states and Washington, D.C. allow some form of sports betting.
FanDuel is currently in 24 of those markets and signing up users in Vermont for when that state’s gaming law goes into effect later this year. According to Global Wireless Solutions (GWS), FanDuel and its closest competitor—DraftKings—account for 65% of a growing online gaming market.
