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 green screen 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.

Keep reading here.—AM

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Amazon Fire TV is rolling out new options for advertisers as connected TV investment continues to climb.

The new offerings, which are expected to roll out now through the end of 2023, represent an expansion of the types of ads available on Fire TV, Charlotte Maines, Amazon’s director of Fire TV advertising, monetization, and engagement, said. They include:

• Allowing managed-service advertisers to buy exclusive inventory on both Fire TV channels and Fire TV devices;
• Expanding inventory to brands outside of the media and entertainment space on Fire TV’s Feature Rotator, an ad unit that appears when users turn on their devices;
• Bundled advertising options that bring Fire TV native display ad inventory into streaming TV campaigns;
• Releasing Search Ads, in which media and entertainment advertisers can appear in sponsored results after users search for content to watch on their device;
• And expanding contextual targeting options that let advertisers select specific genres or opt for machine learning–powered auto-contextualization.

Several of the updates are aimed at helping advertisers target users at the right moment while they’re using Fire TV, Maines said. Search Ads, for example, can help surface sponsored programming recommendations when users are searching for something to watch.

“You could say, ‘Alexa, play the TV show with the guy who plays the lawyer for Breaking Bad’ and you would get the search results of Lucky Hank or Better Call Saul without ever having to remember that actor’s name is Bob Odenkirk,” Maines said.

Go big or go home: The updates come as Fire TV continues pushing into free ad-supported channels and working on growing its customer base. The number of Fire TV customers has grown by nearly 800% since the beginning of the year, and monthly hours streamed on Fire TV are up 185%, Maines said.

Read more here.—JS

Social media: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Since last November, Why Group, Horizon Media’s behavioral science practice, has been tracking trust in social media platforms relative to current events with monthly surveys of around 1,000 Americans. The latest edition of its Social Media Trust Tracker covers data from June, when Linda Yaccarino became CEO of X; July, when Instagram released Threads; and August, when X lifted its ban on political advertising and former president Donald Trump posted on the platform for the first time since being unbanned.

Amid those changes and more, Why Group found social media usage in general hasn’t changed much—although some platforms seem to have bigger potential upsides for brands than others.

Trust issues: The surveys found that the top three “trust factors” in social media among Americans were data safety, trustworthy information, and platform reliability, the same as in the March–May surveys. But for some of the seven factors listed in the surveys, the gap between their importance and how well people think platforms perform on those fronts widened.

• Two-thirds of respondents said that data safety is important, while only 21% said they trust platforms to deliver, marking a six-percentage-point gap increase.
• User verifiability—aka verifying people are who they say they are—saw a five-point gap increase, with 46% saying it’s important and 15% saying they trust platforms to verify users’ identities.

Gen Zers and millennials are driving that gap growth, according to the report. Despite the gaps, though, respondents seem to be using social media to keep up with news and current events more—44%, or seven points higher than the last report, to be exact.

X takes an L: Why Group found steady use for all the major social platforms with the exception of one. The number of respondents who said they anticipate they’ll maintain or increase their use of X, the site formerly known as Twitter, in the next month fell by 12 points from April to August.

• The group of those leaving the platform entirely skews toward Democrats, but not toward any particular age group.
• X only slightly underperformed other platforms in terms of trust, but “the possibility of an alternative to Musk’s changes could be the tipping point,” according to the report.
• About half (49%) of respondents who have tried or are open to trying Threads said a top reason they’re excited about the platform is because it presents an alternative to X or its owner, Elon Musk.

Continue reading here.—AM

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