In the month leading up to the start of the NFL season, influencer and media personality Jake Paul launched Betr Picks, a daily fantasy sports app primed to compete with industry giants PrizePicks, Underdog, FanDuel, and DraftKings. Betr had built an impressive roster of influencers in the sports gaming space to go to market with organically, but wanted to find ways to leverage this talent within their paid user acquisition efforts in hopes to scale exponentially.
Betr, and its gaming consultancy Leverage, partnered Brand Knew to harness its distinctive performance marketing and paid media expertise. With over a decade of working with D2C brands, both start-ups and established, and a wide breadth of talent to build thumb-stopping direct-response creative, Brand Knew agreed to run a pilot paid media program for Betr. With just days before the season kickoff, Brand Knew effectively briefed Betr’s roster of talent on USPs and ad concepts, and quickly transformed their raw footage into engaging UGC-style edutainment assets to attract first-time depositors to Betr Picks.
At campaign launch, a unique web flow user journey was utilized, which provided the ability to track converted users to the email they submitted on Betr landing pages. Bespoke use of UTMs enabled optimization not just for the most effective creative, but also for the cost per first-time depositor downstream. Instead of being hampered by delayed app install reporting and limited by on-platform optimization of creative, conversions were able to be tracked per campaign and down to a creative level, allowing for more granular and informed budget adjustments and scale achieving exceptionally efficient results. Despite being at a disadvantage against competitors’ app event optimized campaigns, Betr’s cost per depositor set a new benchmark for industry-wide optimization.
Advertising more meaningfully for the first time in a highly regulated industry, Betr had to jump through extraordinary hoops to be able to advertise real money gaming. While navigating the complexities of other platforms regulatory guidelines, Brand Knew leveraged its relationships at TikTok to fast-track Betr’s whitelisting into a specialized real money gaming beta program. Despite throttling through just a single platform at launch, Brand Knew still efficiently scaled budget into the first weeks of the season. As each additional platform came online, Brand Knew adeptly navigated policy boundaries to achieve universal approvals, setting internal guidelines for Betr’s media team to follow.
Starting with a modest budget, Betr’s performance soared beyond all expectations. Its cost-effective strategy significantly outperformed leading competitors, catapulting the previously unranked app to top 10 in the Apple App Store’s Sports category, besting apps from the NFL, NBA, and MLB, and securing the third spot in daily fantasy download market share. In just 90 days, Betr emerged from obscurity, to build a $100 million run-rate business, on the back of strategic paid efforts.
This engagement was the icing on top of a series of successful growth stories that led TikTok to award Brand Knew with the honor of Most Innovative Agency of the Year, a true testament to its groundbreaking work for clients on the platform.