“The market continues to open and more people are open-minded about how putting a $5 sports bet on the game tonight just makes it a more enjoyable experience to watch, win or lose,” Sneyd said. “You get a chance to just lean in and enjoy the game more actively than you would have otherwise.”
According to GWS, the number of monthly active sportsbook app users increased 20% in 2023 from a year earlier, with the amount of time spent on those apps increasing 66% over the same span. The estimated value of all online sportsbook bets in the U.S. is $110 billion.
The bettors FanDuel and others are targeting with Super Bowl ads are getting younger—with the number of players 21 to 28 years old increasing 36% from 2022 to 2023—but also increasingly diverse. In 2019, GWS found that just 20% of online sportsbook bettors were women. By 2023, that share had risen to 33%—with the number of women on sportsbooks increasing 45% from the year before. As FanDuel and its competitors have discovered, women are just about as likely to bet on the Super Bowl (59%) as men (70%).
As online sportsbooks have worked to demystify sports gaming and remove the exclusive language and space that would ordinarily deter players, FanDuel has used its Super Bowl marketing to showcase simplicity.
“It’s the day that we need to make ourselves the most accessible,” Sneyd said. “We have the free-to-play game, anyone can download the sportsbook app and decide, for free, ‘I think [Gronkowski]’s going to make it’ or ‘You know what, he’s a tight end, he’s not going to kick this field goal.”
Blitzing the Big Game
“The challenges that as marketers we often face is that we are too quick to try to excuse that you’re doing one thing or another,” Sneyd said. “When you have a big enough idea, and different ways in which it comes to life at different times, we definitely have the opportunity to drive impact that can deliver on multiple business objectives.”
FanDuel wanted to use the Super Bowl to build brand awareness, but it also needed to sign up new customers and get them familiar with its app. Fulfilling all of those goals required FanDuel and Wieden+Kennedy to look beyond the one kick to multiple means of grabbing fans’ attention.
To wring the most out of its latest campaign, FanDuel is stretching the saga of Gronkowski’s second kick over five spots. The first has him wandering the Arizona desert after his first failed attempt before encountering Carl Weathers, who offers guidance similar to that he doled out as Apollo Creed to Sylvester Stallone’s despondent title character in the Rocky sequels—or as golf pro Chubbs Peterson to Adam Sandler’s rage-addled Happy Gilmore.
The second spot sees Gronkowski get a second chance from FanDuel at the expense of WWE star John Cena, who now roots for him to miss. A third spot acts as part movie trailer, part hype reel before leading into a live kick after the Super Bowl’s National Anthem and before the coin toss. The series ends with a mid-game celebration of whichever outcome occurred roughly an hour earlier.
