Could a New Name Fix a Company?
Chris Russo launched a successful fantasy sports business. Would rebranding help the business to grow?
Doron Gild
Reality Check Chris Russo (center) launched a fantasy sports business. It grew into something altogether larger.
Almost from the start, though, FSV's name was a bit of a contradiction; its first acquisition was Hoopsworld, a basketball news site that Russo felt would appeal to fantasy basketball players. The company continued to branch out from fantasy sites -- signing on, for example, blogs targeted to sports at specific colleges and universities. By 2009, FSV was selling advertising space and securing promotions for hundreds of sites, forming a network that attracted as many as 16 million visitors a month. But the Fantasy Sports Ventures name sometimes confused advertisers. "We reached a point where marketers and advertisers were asking for things beyond fantasy," says Evan Kamer, FSV's chief operating officer, "but because of the fantasy moniker, it increasingly became a hurdle for our sales team."Chris Russo had a healthy business. The only thing holding it back, he thought, was its name. Three years after its launch in 2006, Fantasy Sports Ventures's revenue was increasing 40 percent to 50 percent a year, a pace that surprised even Russo. But by the fall of 2009, he was uneasy. Despite the heady growth, Russo felt the company's brand positioning was pigeonholing the business and would soon limit further expansion. What started as an online fantasy sports company had morphed into a business that owned and partnered with all sorts of other sports websites, numbering in the hundreds. The growth of the network had helped FSV amass millions of monthly visitors and placed it among the Top 10 sports online networks, right up there withESPN and Yahoo Sports. Its name no longer reflected what the company had become. "Advertisers make judgments on new companies in a snap," Russo says, "and if they don't want to advertise on a fantasy site for whatever reason, it gets tough because of our name."
Still, Russo was reluctant to tinker with a business that, for the most part, worked. Should the company, he pondered, risk upsetting its trajectory on the bet it might do even better with a new strategy and brand?
When Russo launched Fantasy Sports Ventures, he brought with him a sizableRolodex and six years of experience running the new-media division of the National Football League, where he oversaw the release of the league's fantasy football games. With FSV, he wanted to purchase a handful of prominent fantasy sports sites, then partner with a broader network of independent sites by selling ad space for them and splitting the resulting revenue. "There was a real opportunity to aggregate a whole bunch of niche sites that together would have a large audience and then sell sponsorships and ad programs to big brands that wanted to reach passionate fans," he says. His connections helped him raise an initial $6 million from angel investors and, later, additional funds from USA Today.
By last fall, Kamer and others were pushing for a name change, but Russo remained conflicted. The business was growing, and it had taken considerable resources to build the brand it had. Was hitting Reset really the best move? At one point, Russo proposed the idea of refocusing exclusively on the fantasy sports market. FSV's continued success, though, was forcing his hand. "Traffic continued to grow, and I saw that we had a chance to be a top one or two site," Russo says. "The chance of being bigger than ESPN online started to become a goal to shoot for that two years ago wasn't even in the realm of possibility."
In October 2009, Russo invited the managers of five of FSV's most popular sites toNew York City for an all-day meeting with the executive team to discuss the company's future. In a rented conference room in the Marriott Marquis hotel, Russo laid out the company's growth trajectory. He also hit on the difficulties the sales team was having with tapping into lucrative big-brand advertising budgets for general sports sites. He said he believed that FSV, with its collection of college sports blogs, an overall informal voice, and several sites rich in sports stats, had an opportunity to stake a claim as the indie-voice alternative to sites such as ESPN and Fox Sports. That would mean renaming the brand.
The mood in the room was at times tense. "There was some concern," says Whit Walters, general manager of the fantasy football site The Huddle. "When we came into a fresh company in 2007, we were told we were going to be a fantasy company and were told that was the best positioning for FSV." Still, he had faith in Russo and FSV and was willing to hear him out. The others were willing to listen, too, but the idea of a new brand name took time to digest. "You could see the gears turning in lots of people's minds," says Ron Shandler, editor and publisher of Baseball HQ, another fantasy site, "trying to figure out what this meant and project out the ripple effect."
The Decision In December 2009, Russo enlisted the branding firm SME to help him come up with a fresh concept for FSV and explore the possibility of coming up with a new brand name. (The company's name would remain Fantasy Sports Ventures.) To start, FSV's executive team worked with SME's Ed O'Hara to explore repositioning the company. O'Hara ran the team through an exercise to articulate what made FSV different from other sports sites. Russo recalls saying, "What we have is really unparalleled breadth and depth of sports knowledge and insight that helps make fans smarter. And we're also independent, a little bit irreverent, and entrepreneurial."
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