The first time he heard of fantasy sports, University of Mississippi associate professor Kim Beason thought of Dungeons & Dragons. That was in the late 1980s, and at the time he wasn’t far off. The original fantasy sports leagues were paper-and-pencil geekfests run by small groups of people more attuned to statistics than to muscle and testosterone. “Major league sports used to laugh when people would call up and say, ‘Listen, we’d like you to sponsor our [fantasy] league,’” recalls Beason, a noted fantasy sports researcher.

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How times have changed. Over the past decade, fantasy sports — in which participants “draft” real professional players to create hypothetical teams and then win or lose based on the players’ statistical performance over the following season — has gone emphatically mainstream. About 15 million Americans now participate, generating $1.5 billion in annual revenue, numbers that are growing by 7 percent to 10 percent a year, Beason estimates.

And these aren’t just any consumers. They’re the demographic gold standard for marketers: well-educated, affluent men in their 30s and 40s who spend inordinate amounts of time browsing the Web for sports scores and stats and watching games on TV. The average fantasy sports player spends $493 per year on his hobby, Beason notes.

Now the fantasy league concept is spreading beyond the major team sports. Yahoo! Sports currently features fantasy golf and auto racing, for instance. “We see games like fantasy badminton and fantasy rugby developing overseas, and there’s fantasy lacrosse and fantasy wrestling now,” says Jeffrey Thomas, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

With this winning combination of demographics and growth comes a wide array of marketing possibilities. The NFL recently partnered with CBS SportsLine.com to sponsor fantasy games at NFL.com, and Sprint and ESPN have partnered on a cell phone that provides users with access to current stats and live football and baseball game feeds.

And as fantasy sports corral ever-larger numbers of affluent consumers, the question becomes how to reach, engage, and build a lasting bond with those users. Here are some strategies that could translate to almost any business or industry:

Attract sales with online advertising. With fantasy sports thriving online, the most direct way to reach players is via ads on popular Web sites. Recently, ads for Chevrolet, mortgage broker LowerMyBills.com, telecom firm Alltel and golf club maker Callaway were all prominently displayed on various parts of the Yahoo! Fantasy Sports Web complex.

The three biggest online fantasy sports sites, Yahoo! Fantasy Sports, CBS SportsLine, and ESPN Fantasy, according to New York–based media consultancy Hitwise. Higher traffic brings ad rates that may be prohibitive for niche products, of course. But there are dozens of fantasy sports sites with more favorable traffic/price combinations. Rotoworld, for instance, generated 1.24 percent of fantasy sports traffic in June, according to Hitwise, and has featured ads for Blockbuster Online and the Internet phone service SunRocket.

“Fantasy sports site visitors are very attractive eyeballs for us,” says SunRocket spokesman Brian Lustig. “Most are broadband savvy, and young adult males tend to be early adopters.” SunRocket advertises on second-tier fantasy sports sites as part of a network buy among sites that hit an important demographic, he adds.

Build your customer base with free games. London’s Daily Telegraph offered a free fantasy football (soccer) game that attracted 265,000 teams for the 2005–06 season. Dozens of U.S. papers, ranging in size from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to the Schenectady Gazette, have run similar promotions. “A fantasy sports contest can be a five- or six-month promotion, so it creates an opportunity for long-term gains,” Thomas says. “Possible goals could include marketing database generation, single-copy sales, subscription sales, reader entertainment, online traffic building, and increasing the average amount of time spent online per user.”

Westport, Conn.–based heavy- equipment maker Terex runs a fantasy football game for customers and dealers. It farms out the statistics and scoring to another firm and solicits other companies, including UPS and Chevron, to contribute prizes. Terex spent about $10,000 to set up the game and now spends $5,000 each year to maintain it, says Tom Bright, the company’s director of parts sales. And the return, to borrow MasterCard’s phrase, has been priceless. “Our customers and dealers have their own mini-leagues where they compete against each other,” Bright says. “You don’t have to ask them who won — they’ll tell you. This is very inexpensive online marketing.”

Sponsor another firm’s game. Memphis BBQ restaurant Corky’s supplies the main weekly prize in Terex’s game — a full spread of ribs with plenty of fixings. “It’s shipped up to a week in advance, so it can arrive in time for the Monday night football game,” says Jan Klein, director of mail-order operations for Corky’s. The payoff? During the height of the football season, 3,000 visitors log on to Terex’s site daily to check game schedules and scores. “Our logo and information are on their Web site, which brings us a lot of repeat business,” Klein says.

These general approaches have proved to be effective, Thomas asserts. But tomorrow’s best fantasy sports marketing will drill down to reach precisely identified subgroups. “There is a variety of brand categories in fantasy sports and a variety of game formats within each category,” he says. “Successful companies will design their integrated marketing communications strategy recognizing these differences. For example, international opportunities and local grassroots marketing will get a lot of attention in the next couple of years.”

As Beason notes, participants are downright captivated by fantasy sports, and marketers of every stripe should be as well.

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