Did you know that fantasy league, which is now a multi-billion dollar industry, was created by an Oakland Bar manager named Andrew Mousalimas more than 50 years ago? Yes, it’s not a league that was created by a businessman or a marketing guru with an intent to make money – but by a passionate fan in Oakland.
So what exactly is a fantasy league?
More famous in sports, it is a type of online game where participants and passionate fans assemble virtual teams of real players, and get points based on the actual performances of the players in a real-world competition. Generally there are prizes and giveaways after the league is over. Many companies and brands within the entertainment industry such as movies, music, and gaming are creating their own fantasy leagues.
Many leagues are including some sort of gamification to engage their fans more – and to provide them with new content. One example is bracket voting campaigns where users can predict and vote for the outcome of a league play.
Here are some benefits of using brackets for your fantasy leagues:
- Drive massive audience engagement: Brackets work really well for driving massive audience engagement. Brackets run over multiple rounds driving repeat engagement on your topics. Campaigns see very high usage time on-site/in-app, repeat usage & social shares.
- Generate leads: Within brackets you can use registration hooks and ask users to provide their information before they can login and vote for their favorites. Collect email addresses, name, phone number, create calls to action or any other data that is relevant to you. Brackets are a natural growth engine.
- Generate revenue through advertisements: Brackets work really well to run advertisements, generate product purchases and more, all within your campaign. As many brands want to be part of these leagues and reach new customer base, they are now sponsoring and running advertisements on the leagues.
- Build community: People who take part in these leagues are mostly passionate fans. Brackets enable your fans to get competitive. You can have multi-channel conversations with your audience and help build and grow your community.
- Know customer sentiments: Bracket campaigns are a great way to learn audience sentiment in real time. You can download data and get insights on what your audience is voting on and what are they saying about your brackets campaign on social channels.
As you can see brackets work really well when you can create your own leagues and it has many benefits. However, many marketers face challenges in figuring out how a bracket should look and what key features it should have to drive better results. At Votion we have built brackets that marketers can easily create within minutes and includes these amazing features:
Live mode brackets enable campaigns where competitors are set up through our console and real world events determine the outcomes. Clients can manually advance competitors based on their offline results or based on things like online gaming results. Clients can leverage our built-in scoring algorithm or can hook into our custom scoring or real-time scoring modules based on their needs for particular campaigns.
2. Custom products
We’ve built a variety of custom products powered by our back end platform for specific campaign needs. Get in touch if you have a campaign idea but don’t see a great off the shelf fit with our existing suite.
3. Custom Scoring
While the Votion suite comes with a pre-built scoring algorithm that works out of the box, we also offer custom scoring that gives clients control over the score for each round of play. Scoring can be set up to match round based or campaign based goals.
4. Real-time scoring
For campaigns needing instant or near real time scoring options, we can enable one way or two way syncs via API calls to and from any available scoring system. This enables competitors to advance as they do in “real life” and automates the entire scoring and competitor advancement process.
5. Custom Leaderboard
Leaderboards work out of the box but we also have a variety of options for customizing the results, look & feel and fields available for public consumption.
6. SSO & Registration system integration
Many of our enterprise clients require SSO and/or custom registration options. We’ve built a very flexible architecture that enables our clients to leverage any type of user or demographic information to be collected, and we offer a variety of hooks into 3rd party solutions (including via APIs for in-house data stores on the client end) for registration and sign on.
Conclusion
With fantasy league becoming a global phenomenon, more and more brands are taking advantage of it, reaching new customers, keeping their passionate fans happy and providing their audience with new content formats. Brackets campaigns are the new ways in which brands and sports companies can create a league of their own and ask their audience to vote on their favorites. At Votion, we have built one the most productive brackets that can help you build amazing campaigns easily and your fans will love it.