Bryson DeChambeau Should Drive Success With DraftKings Partnership

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

In past posts, we have analyzed both how sportsbooks are leveraging sports content and how companies are working with athletes as influencers to acquire and engage with their customers. DraftKings’ announcement of a new partnership with U.S. Open Champion Bryson DeChambeau demonstrates an interesting confluence of these emerging trends.

While DraftKings and its most well-known competitor FanDuel have been longtime sports sponsors, having DeChambeau become the “face of DraftKings golf” may seem surprising. More specifically, one could ask why would DraftKings want or need a face for golf and why DeChambeau?

Golf in general is important to both fantasy and betting customers that make up DraftKings’ core demographics. According to Sportico, golf is DraftKings’ “fourth most-popular fantasy sport, behind football, basketball and baseball, and the shot-by-shot nature of the game also works well for live betting. The sportsbook’s golf handle has grown tenfold in the past year.”

DeChambeau specifically is also likely attractive to DraftKings’ audience given his interests and focus on the intersection of physics and golf. DeChambeau has spent recent months adding a significant amount of muscle and power to his game to maximize his distance off the tee while also mastering his “engineer” putting style.

B6A’s research has shown that driving distance (and not accuracy) and number of putts are two of the most important factors in achieving PGA Tour success. DeChambeau’s ability to win the U.S. Open by a large margin while only hitting 17 out of 42 fairways is a testament to this approach. Many sports bettors and daily fantasy players (i.e., DraftKings customers) employ similar types of mathematical analysis to understand athletic performance and how to maximize their probability of success.

In addition, we used AIP to analyze the demographics of DraftKings’ and DeChambeau’s accounts to determine audience fit across multiple attributes. The table below shows a sample of this analysis.

The fit of the two accounts is at one of the highest levels we have seen from an age, education, and income perspective. What is particularly interesting is that DeChambeau’s audience does not skew towards older demographics as can be more common with golfers or the sport more generally. This is one potential reason that DraftKings wanted to enhance its official betting operator partnership with the PGA Tour with a relationship with DeChambeau.

DraftKings’ activation strategy for the DeChambeau partnership is also worthy of additional exploration. While DraftKings will advertise its logo on Bryson DeChambeau’s famous cap during golf tournaments he will also appear in “marketing events, videos and sweepstakes.”

In my post “Predicting The Masters” for Sports Business Journal in 2019, I emphasized that a PGA golfer’s sponsorship value is tied to his ability to perform well on the course. In particular, golfers competing for the lead in a tournament obtain a disproportionate share of on-screen logo exposure time compared with those not in contention.

While he has been performing particularly well since he started to transform his body, DeChambeau will not always be in contention to win tournaments. Therefore, it is critical to leverage his star power off the course to maximize exposure and engagement with DraftKings’ target audience through marketing events, videos and sweepstakes.

Data-driven decision-making is a core component of DraftKings’ betting and daily fantasy business models. The company’s decision to partner with DeChambeau appears to reflect this data-driven approach given the partnership’s fit and activation strategy.