There was a time, not so long ago, when a sports betting company buying a national television commercial was engaged in a peculiar form of overspending: paying to reach tens of millions of viewers in states where its core product remained as illegal as it had been since the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992.
That time, DraftKings would like you to know, is over.
The company's new advertising campaign, which began running on Aug. 31, features Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas — the latter replacing LeBron James, whose endorsement deal expired earlier this year — driving a 1970 Chevelle across an America where DraftKings is now available, in one form or another, in all 50 states. The spots, created by the Brooklyn agency Translation and shot on film in a style meant to evoke a movie trailer, make the geographic expansion their central selling point.
"Now that DraftKings is available in all 50 states, we can finally go on that road trip we've always talked about," Mr. Jonas says in the opening spot, a line that functions as both setup and product announcement.
The availability comes with an asterisk, of course. In states that have legalized online sports betting, the DraftKings app offers its sportsbook. In states that have not, it defaults to prediction markets, which operate under federal regulation and which became newly prominent after the predictions company Kalshi began rewriting the rules two Super Bowls ago. The campaign's first spot name-checks Texas, Florida and California — the three most populous states that had remained beyond DraftKings' reach until predictions arrived to provide an alternative path.
"We wanted to embody that notion that you can engage with us no matter where you are," said Stephanie Sherman, the chief marketing officer at DraftKings. (What, you were expecting the tagline to say, "Take Your Game to 33 States and the District of Columbia"?)
The campaign will include other themes as the football season progresses — one spot promotes touchdown props, another delivers a responsible gambling message — but the strategic weight rests on the "available anywhere" claim. Eric Foote, the chief executive of Vig Partners, a sports betting consultancy, called the unified app "a genius move," noting that the marketing efficiency of reaching a national audience with a national product would easily cover the product development costs.
For DraftKings, which has been an N.F.L. sponsor since 2021, the math has finally caught up with the media buy.
Original story published in sportsbusinessjournal.com: "DraftKings' latest ad campaign takes aim at the next frontier"