Puppets, Burlesque, and the Truth About the Fantasy Football Audience

Draft season is almost here, which means most fantasy football campaigns are already locked. Before yours goes out the door, it's worth checking the assumptions it's built on. RYA's audience data says that what they're actually into points somewhere most draft-season creative isn't looking.

RYA runs on a decade of always-on passion-point data from real people, refreshed weekly. We pulled the audience of people who say they love fantasy football. Here's what's actually true about them.

Their passions aren't what you'd guess

RYA tracks roughly 200 genres, and fantasy football lovers' top 25, measured against everyone else, includes puppets (45% more than average), telenovelas (44% more), and burlesque (39% more). Participatory theater and daytime talk shows are on the list too. Nothing about "manages a fantasy roster" predicts any of that.

Youth sports is in that top 25. Half of fantasy football lovers are parents with kids at home, which differs from the assumption that the fantasy owner is a young single guy. In fact, they are far more likely to be parents than average football fans, 51% against 33%. A lot of lineups are getting set from the sidelines of a kid's weekend game.

One in five plays a sport themselves

The single biggest over-index in this audience is playing a sport: 20% of them play. That runs ahead of their passion for fantasy sports itself. They are 130% more likely to play than the average American.

Their top 25 also carries cricket at 57% more than gen pop, rugby at 55%, rowing at 49%, and soccer at 47%, which is a lot of sport for an audience organized around one league.

They make things

17% of this audience creates content of some kind, audio, video, or images, at 70% more than the average person.

That is a lot of making for a group most media plans treat as just viewers. It also fits the behavior the category already exemplifies. The trash talk, the league group chat, the roster screenshots are all production instincts.

Perhaps Yahoo was on to this, when they added Cameo creators as a paid add-on to the platform this year to announce leagues’ draft orders.

Creative that gives them something to make is working with an instinct they already have, and it is mostly unused. 

So what does right look like

Build for the group chat. This audience wants to make something. That means creative with an output: a shareable roster card, a trash-talk generator, a bit they can screenshot and drop into the league thread. The unit of distribution is the group chat, which runs on things people can send each other.

Show up where the parents are. Saturday morning fields, youth league sponsorships, and anything that acknowledges the reality of managing a lineup between games are closer to this audience than any bar.

Borrow from the strange passions. Puppets, telenovelas, and burlesque are odd on paper, but they share a quality: heightened, performed, and a little theatrical. Three unrelated genres pointing the same direction is a signal worth testing, and it points a long way from earnest sports-hero voiceover. Draft-season creative that plays big and slightly absurd is closer to the mark than creative that plays it straight.

The common thread is that all three start from what the audience already does, which is the only reliable place for creative to start.