The NFL season has begun, which means it is the beginning of the busiest time of the year for sports bets.
As chief marketing officer of FanDuel – NFL’s official sports betting partner – Andrew Sneyd’s goal is to help football fans place bets on their favorite teams and by doing so, grow the brand in this emerging category.
“One of the great challenges that we have here at FanDuel is making sure that people can appreciate that FanDuel’s product is the leader of the category. It is the best-in-class product,” says Sneyd. “Sometimes it’s not easy to make that clear in a new category. We’re doing everything we can to try to make sure that that’s even more obvious in the marketplace with incredible ways we let people bet on new things.”
The company is always looking for new ways to make its app more engaging. For Super Bowl 2024, the company launched the Squares Project, inspired by common Super Bowl party bets. As part of the new NFL season, FanDuel is running an NFL Sunday Ticket Promotion. Essentially FanDuel customers who bet $5 will receive a three-week free trial for NFL Sunday Ticket from YouTube and YouTube TV. YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket gives fans access to live out-of-market Sunday afternoon games throughout the regular NFL season. New customers who bet $5 for the first time will also receive $200 in Bonus Bets.
Sports betting has grown tremendously over the last few years, becoming legal in more than 30 states today. As the industry grows, FanDuel helps to guide the best practices. “We are at the dawn of this industry in America and we have the opportunity as the leaders of online gaming to build this the right way,” says Sneyd.
“It is a regulated product and it should be. It still affords us the opportunity to be an integral part of sports and entertainment in a way that can really help people make more of their experiences,” he continues. “I really see it as a great responsibility to not only grow FanDuel into the next iconic sports brand in America, but also build this category to be the legacy to lead the industry forward in a way that’s great for generations of fans to enjoy the category more.”
Prior to joining FanDuel, Sneyd held senior leadership roles at Priceline and AB InBev. Brand Innovators caught up with Sneyd to talk about the growth in the sports betting industry, NFL Sunday Ticket partnership and educating consumers on how to use the app. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about the new NFL Sunday Ticket effort and the strategy behind these partnerships?
We have a great opportunity to make sure that as many Americans as possible have the opportunity to watch as much NFL content as they can. We see that the more people are able to watch sports, the more likely they will watch and bet. If you look over the past year, football games were the dominant live viewing experience. Ninety-four of the Top 100 watched shows on television last year were football games.
Sunday Ticket allows you to enjoy all the Sunday content so that you can get even more football. More football means more storylines, more hunches that you might have on how the game is going to evolve, which gives you more opportunity to turn those hunches into sports bets. It was a natural fit for us to be their partner to take the opportunity to get as much football into people’s hands as possible. We genuinely appreciate the opportunity to give a free trial with a $5 bet, a free trial to everyone so they can see how great this product is.
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Can you talk about who you’re trying to reach?
It’s a big group of people. We think about the world of television sports as the last water cooler. The NFL was dominantly the thing that everyone could talk about on Monday, because it’s the thing that people still watch live together. It continues to be a mass audience with huge appeal. Obviously folks that really love the game and want to be able to watch all parts of it versus just the casual fans are the ones that are more likely to be sports betters and more likely to sign up for Sunday Ticket. It is that more engaged NFL fan that really wants to soak up the entire season.
We only have 18 weeks of football before the playoffs. Your team only plays 17 games. It’s important to make sure that we don’t miss the opportunity to enjoy every drop of NFL football, during the season. We are an app that’s available with content all year round, but NFL Sundays are our biggest days of the year.
We enjoy sports that range from those that get the most viewing eyeballs like the NFL, but people will find whatever sports they’re interested in throughout the year. We’ve been seeing a summer that’s been packed with people enjoying baseball. We’ve really improved our products so that you can enjoy more things to bet on with Major League Baseball.
We saw a huge uptick in WNBA as live event viewership for the WNBA increased. We made our product better so that the WNBA product was as good as our NBA product. We were fortunate that that investment turned into incredible growth in the interest of the sport, one in 12 betters in the first 50 games placed a bet on Caitlin Clark. NFL Sundays are the most important Sundays of the year, but we certainly have opportunities throughout the year for people to engage and enjoy their sports.
How are you educating consumers who are new to the sports betting space?
The whole category is still really new. 2018 was the first time that legalized sports betting was an opportunity online. There’s lots of work for us to still do to make sure that we’re welcoming new customers, whether it’s new customers that are just joining now in New Jersey or North Carolina, there’s a lot of work that our team is doing to make sure our products ready for someone that is just fresh into this for the first time.
While we have an intuitive app, there’s lots of interesting ways that we give people to look for tutorials to have the opportunity to see what popular bets are happening, even including a series of videos that help people from the very basics of Sports Betting 101. Our app is also ready for the most intuitive sports betters that really want to be able to get to their bet quickly with the fewest number of clicks. It’s always an interesting opportunity for our product folks to make sure that we’re there for new customers and for the most experienced bettors to find what they’re looking for quickly.
Can you talk about your approach to leadership and how your past experiences have helped you in your current role?
As I look back at my career, I’ve had two different chapters. I spent much of my career in CPG marketing and leading beer brands in a regulated environment, which helped me appreciate what it is to try to grow the image of a brand and make sure that you’re delivering in a responsible way. That definitely helped me having that brand building in a regulated environment background before starting at FanDuel. I spent part of my career at Booking.com, leading Priceline marketing and had the opportunity to really appreciate what it’s like to be in a digital-first business where you can actually see the behaviors of customers in real time and understand how you can improve the measurement of marketing resources.
I like to talk a lot about the art, science and discipline of marketing, and you have to have all three. Certainly there’s the art of building brand imagery, the science of appreciating customer behavior, and all the disciplines of trying to be able to measure that well, including making sure that you’re the resources of where you’ve got your team working and the types of dollars that are on certain types of projects. It is a beautiful balance when people are able to use the art, science and discipline of marketing well to drive a brand and a business forward, in a way that can separate itself from others in the category.
