A challenger fantasy sports brand plans to take on the big dogs

The world of fantasy sports is dog-eat-dog—and not just for those managing fantasy teams. For brands that operate fantasy platforms, it’s a competitive space, especially given the dominance of major sports media companies like ESPN and Yahoo and sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings. But there’s at least one underdog with a plan to take them on.

Underdog Fantasy, a fantasy and sports-betting company founded in 2020, is ramping up its marketing efforts to try to reach sports fans outside of the typical male-dominated demographic.

“It’s very obvious who is being targeted with traditional advertising when it comes to fantasy sports and real-money gaming,” Underdog CMO Liz Marro told Marketing Brew. “There’s a huge opportunity for whoever can figure out how to unlock the other half of the population

With its biggest-budget ad campaign to date, which premiered this fall, Marro said Underdog is trying to capture that opportunity and get sports fans barking.

Ruff cut

Underdog started running TV commercials in 2021, Marro said, and at the start, they were fairly scrappy—filmed in the office in front of a greenscreen taped to the wall, with the scripts written by Marro and read by in-house talent.

“I think we actually had an investor reach out to us and compliment us on our purposefully lo-fi strategy,” she said. “They thought it was on purpose that we were doing it on such a tight budget.”

More recently, Underdog has shifted its strategy away from lo-fi and direct-response advertising and toward brand awareness marketing designed to encourage growth, Marro said. That’s in part because the company is growing: Underdog recently cleared 1 million paid customers, and has grown from 10 to about 350 employees in three years.

The company’s new campaign, “The Dogs Are All Here,” which debuted with a few 15-second spots in mid-September and led up to a 30-second ad released in late October, is, according to Marro, the company’s first pure brand awareness push.

The campaign, which is running against sports and non-sports content across national TV channels and digital platforms, is mostly “just people saying ‘dog’ over and over again,” as Marro put it. But that’s intentional—Marro wanted to “keep it really simple,” she said.

Who let the dogs out in

In addition to being Underdog’s first pure brand awareness effort, the new campaign marks the first time the brand has brought in outside creative support. Creative and production agency The Rec League worked on creative development, production, editorial, and post-production, and the sports-focused creative agency Bulletin Board Material served as a consultant. While Marro declined to share Underdog’s budget for the campaign, she said it was “definitely the most we’ve ever spent on a commercial.”

Why the fall campaign? It’s because the NFL season is “a really important time for our business,” Marro said. “It’s when there’s the most noise in the category. It’s when everybody is spending the most. We knew now that we are really operating at scale, we had to be playing with the bigger competitors, and in order to do that, we needed a highly produced commercial.”

Although the brand isn’t running a Super Bowl ad, “The Dogs Are All Here” will continue to air with different creative interactions on television at least through Super Bowl Sunday in ad slots elsewhere, according to Marro. Underdog might also have a placement during Discovery’s annual Puppy Bowl, she said, as it has in years past.

Marro’s hope is that targeting a broad audience will give Underdog a “competitive edge,” and that keeping the concept simple—instead of adding something like a promo code that might have made the ad more measurable—will help the brand reinforce its message. Overall, the campaign is designed to convey a sense of community, Marro told us.

“We think everybody has that dog in them,” she said. “Everybody’s got a little bit of an underdog in them, and we really hope that people get that when they see the ad.”