FanDuel, DraftKings Try to Reach Women Sports Fans

For every woman who bets on a sporting event in the U.S., there are four men exchanging high fives in the sportsbook around her. For women who want to place bets, the gender imbalance they encounter among sports bettors has deep roots in its illegal, male-dominated history. For gaming companies and their marketers, it’s a tremendous opportunity to even the odds. More than four years after the Supreme Court’s Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association decision opened the door to legal sports betting nationwide, 34 states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of sports gambling. A report from Grand View Research places the value of the U.S. sports betting market at $11 billion, with Nielsen reporting that online gambling ad spending hit $150 million in the first half of 2021 alone. While Nielsen found that 46% of the U.S. population has at least some interest in sports gambling—including 55% of all sports fans—all portions of that group aren’t being reached equally. According to Pew Research, 69% of men say they have read or heard about legalized sports gambling, compared to just 44% of women. The Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association claims men comprise 80% of all sports bettors. Gaming companies and sports leagues alike told Adweek they want women to be more than one in five of their bettors, and they and their marketers have torn down some of the less inviting aspects of gambling culture to sweeten the pot. As the legalization of sports gambling continues throughout the U.S. and online gaming companies grow in influence, there are underrepresented and fast-growing gaming markets among both women and women's sports fans. Increasingly, marketers are seeing each of those gaming audiences as locks rather than long shots. “Our fan is younger, more diverse, more urban-based and more digitally savvy,” said Colie Edison, chief growth officer at the WNBA. “When you look at that, it is no big leap to think that they would obviously engage at a much higher rate in sports betting. It's pretty telling that our fan is a fan that all companies would want to access.” Opening the players’ club To Mike Raffensperger, online betting service FanDuel’s chief commercial officer, even that 80-20 split in sports betting seems generous. He's seen women as only one in 10 sports bettors for years—and his company's looking to change that. He noted that he now works for CEO Amy Howe and that four of his colleagues in FanDuel’s nine-seat C-suite are women. It took FanDuel more than a decade to reach that level of executive parity, and Raffensperger said it's the environment the company wants to see for its gamers. FanDuel's primary goal is to create an approachable, easy-to-use gaming platform for all sports fans—including women. “Sports fandom is not broadly gendered: It's about 50-50. Gambling is not gendered: It is about 50-50,” he said. “Sports betting historically has been 90-10, so that belies a real opportunity.” FanDuel is seeing early signs of success, attracting 1.7 million women to the service last year, according to Global Wireless Solutions (GWS). That’s nearly double the 900,000 women who joined DraftKings at the same time, but represents a boon for online sports betting in general. Though GWS said there are still 250% more men than women in online sports gambling, women are signing up at a much faster rate year over year (a 115% increase from 2020) than their male counterparts (63%). https://twitter.com/FanDuel/status/1569883304937103360 Raffensperger refers to sports betting prior to legalization as a “black and gray market that was just culturally something that men did.” It was a world of local bookies, offshore books, arcane language and trips to crowded Las Vegas sportsbooks filled with committed gamblers. “Sports betting was done in Las Vegas a certain way for a very long period of time: You go up to a big odds board, and it looks like advanced calculus. It's lots of pluses and minuses and numbers that maybe people don't understand,” said Scott Kaufman-Ross, svp and head of gaming and new business ventures at the NBA. “The way that sports betting has been done for so long has disenfranchised a lot of folks, so making it more approachable, more engaging, more interactive and, frankly, simpler is really important to engage this new audience.” Joining the leagues Online apps like FanDuel offers tutorials and make betting a streamlined, more private experience. It allows novice bettors to bet on the big-tent sports events they tend to flock to—Super Bowl, March Madness, the World Series—and shows them how to lay parlay bets that can yield large payouts for minimal outlays. But they also don’t gatekeep which games are on the screen. Not only do fans using FanDuel not have to ask to put a WNBA or Women’s Tennis Association game on—an obstacle women's sports frequently face in sportsbooks at casinos, racetracks and elsewhere—but those leagues are the company’s official partners. While the WNBA is no stranger to gaming sponsorships (NBA commissioner Adam Silver wrote an op-ed calling for legalized sports gambling, while WNBA and NBA partner MGM once owned the WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces), it now runs a WNBA Daily Fantasy game that’s seen participation grow 33% within the last year. https://twitter.com/AUProSports/status/1563934685952196609 In the WNBA’s FanDuel sportsbook, bets are up 300% over the last year, with the average wager amount increasing 192%. “It's a lower barrier to entry than your traditional sportsbook,” the WNBA’s Edison said. “There's a growing demand for engagement with women, not just in WNBA but in general.” Other leagues—and other online gaming companies—are following the WNBA and FanDuel’s lead. Athletes Unlimited (AU) runs professional women’s softball, volleyball, lacrosse and basketball leagues and has partnered with DraftKings and Caesars Sportsbook to allow fans to bet on games. It’s also teamed with monitoring firm Sportradar to detect irregular betting patterns and match fixing. “We are open to anything that has the potential to grow our fanbase, including betting, which we know generates interest among fans and potential new fans,” said AU’s CEO and co-founder Jon Patricof. “As more states introduce sports betting and it becomes more mainstream, we will continue to see it as an integral piece of our larger fan engagement puzzle.” All in While there is tremendous opportunity to draw more women into sports betting and more bettors to women’s sports, leagues and their gaming industry partners note that marketers don’t have to conflate those goals. https://twitter.com/FDSportsbook/status/1571996238324838400 Colie noted that while her league’s partnership with FanDuel brings more women into sports betting, the breakdown of the WNBA fanbase is 55% men and 45% women. Last year, FanDuel partnered with women-run, women-focused sports media company The Gist on fantasy sports and sports betting content. Those branded stories and instructional articles focused on the National Football League. The Gist has 550,000 subscribers to its sports newsletter, and 85% wanted educational materials about sports betting. Another 70% wanted to bet on major leagues like the NFL and NBA. FanDuel Goes All-In on Executives as Online Gaming Grows While The Gist plans similar sports gambling coverage of the Women’s World Cup in 2023—with 80% of readers saying they’d want to bet on women’s sports if such wagers were more widely available—co-founder Jacie deHoop noted that the NFL is the No. 1 sport for The Gist’s audience. While deHoop believes opportunities to bet on women’s sports will grow with the sports themselves, she noted that her audience is more concerned with responsible gaming and the potential risks of sports betting. “We're very aware of some of those barriers in place for an audience like ours that is highly educated, progressive and relatively discerning,” she said. “It's very easy for somebody to have a terrible experience in placing a bet and losing a lot of money very quickly, and they're never going to come back.”

Sports Marketing News

How Sports Betting Companies Are Trying to Reach Women

FanDuel and DraftKings partner with women's sports leagues like the WNBA to meet an underserved, but growing audience

Jason Notte

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Jason Notte