The NFL last week named DraftKings the league’s first official daily fantasy sports partner.
As part of a multiyear deal, DraftKings will receive exclusive sponsorship and NFL branding across its fantasy platform. The two entities will collaborate on content for the DraftKings app, including marks, logos, data, NextGen Stats and NFL-produced video clips. What the agreement does not include are promotional rights for DraftKings’ traditional sports betting operations.
Daily fantasy sports skyrocketed in popularity five years ago, with major league baseball, the NBA and NHL each partnering with DFS operators. NFL franchises formed commercial partnerships and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Patriots owner Robert Kraft each invested in DraftKings.
The NFL, at the league level, however, kept its distance until now, ESPN said.
“This is a defining moment in the daily fantasy sports industry,” Ezra Kucharz, chief business officer at DraftKings, said in a release announcing the partnership.
Roughly 19 percent of Americans are projected to participate in fantasy sports this year, according to data from the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association. The NFL remains the most popular league for fantasy sports. DraftKings says nearly 90 percent of its users have played in an NFL daily fantasy contest.
Daily fantasy football deepens fan engagement with the NFL, Renie Anderson, chief revenue officer and executive vice president of NFL partnerships, said.
In related news, DraftKings’ thirst for more deals doesn’t seem to end. The latest example: A partnership with Pepsi. The sportsbook and fantasy sports operator officially announced on Tuesday that it had struck a deal with the soda company to provide a free prediction game. The prediction game itself was already live, however.
The Pepsi Live Prediction Challenge, where fans can pick among three outcomes related to a given week’s NFL games. The game is available via the DraftKings Sportsbook app. The weekly max prize is $5,000; a season-long contest related to the game will award a trip to the Super Bowl in Miami to the best predictor of the season.
“The Pepsi brand and its longstanding synergy with pro football hardly needs an introduction, making this partnership such a special opportunity for DraftKings to team up with an organization that genuinely shares our passion for the game,” Ezra Kucharz, the chief business officer at DraftKings told Legal Sports Report.
“Our player community cannot get enough football and collaborating to launch the Pepsi Live Prediction Challenge on DraftKings helps to both satiate this ever-growing demand and further stoke fans’ competitive flames through new innovation.”
