Only two months ago, daily fantasy sports companies and their customers in New York were anxiously waiting for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign into law a bill that the legislature had passed in June to legalize and protect daily fantasy sports. Now, four weeks into the 2016 NFL season, the landscape has markedly improved: FanDuel has signed seven new advertising deals in a short time, Yahoo Finance has learned.

It is a key sign that brands big and small are once again willing to work with DFS operators, after a period in which the industry had a bad smell to it.

Mike Pine, FanDuel’s GM of integrated partnerships, acknowledges that there was a stretch in which scoring brand partners was no easy task for the company. “We hit a couple of roadblocks with the regulatory process there,” he says. “Sales are not easy no matter what’s going on, but with legal hurdles it made it especially difficult. But with the New York law, that has kind of subsided.”

It appears that Cuomo’s signing of the DFS bill on Aug. 4 brought some brands out of hiding that had been taking a wait-and-see approach. FanDuel, which is based in New York, has signed ad deals with Bacardi, Corona (BUD), Sling TV (DISH), Focus Features, mattress startup Casper, game maker Machine Zone, and Chef’s Cut jerky all in the past six weeks. Some of those deals have already launched, while others had not, and begin soon. It also has pre-existing deals with SeatGeek and Playboy, among others.

Selling a piece of FanDuel

What do ad deals look like for FanDuel? In most cases, the advertiser sponsors a FanDuel co-branded contest, which means it gets branding on the mobile app and desktop site, and usually a click-through to some kind of special offer from the company or prize drawing. Take Sling TV, an over-the-top streaming platform from Dish, as an example: Sling gets “ownership,” for a period of time, of FanDuel’s NFL Sunday Rush contest. Bacardi is doing the same for its new Oakheart spiced rum.

Users see a banner ad and can click it or just ignore it. “We never want the user to feel like their experience is being disrupted by brands,” says Pine. “The last thing we ever want to do is if you’re setting your lineup, and you’re trying to select Tom Brady, and you get smacked in the face with an Arby’s Roast Beef ad.”

Each deal looks a little different. Casper’s sponsorship, which begins later this month, will be called the NFL “sleeper pick” (get it?) of the week, and will get pushed to users solely through an email campaign, and solely to users who opt in. FanDuel’s first ever brand partnership was with Anheuser-Busch InBev (which also owns Corona) around Bud Light, for last year’s NBA Playoffs. (The NBA has an investment stake in FanDuel.) The final winner of an ongoing contest received a trip to the NBA Finals, paid for by Bud Light. “Brands sell brands, right,” says Pine, “so after Bud Light came, Bacardi was like, ‘What are we missing on the spirit side?’” (FanDuel does not yet know whether Bud Light will renew its deal for the 2017 NBA Finals.)

Ad deals work similarly for DraftKings, which has partners like Monster Energy, TGI Fridays, Sling TV (like FanDuel), and Ugg (endorsed by Tom Brady, whose New England Patriots have an extensive partnership with DraftKings). DraftKings has focused particularly on sponsor deals that promote new movies, including “Deepwater Horizon,” “Mechanic: Resurrection,” “Hacksaw Ridge” (all Lionsgate), and “Jack Reacher 2” (Paramount).

The outlook for DFS is not yet all sunny

To be sure, FanDuel and DraftKings are hardly out of the woods from legal scrutiny—and even in New York, where the new fantasy law has been taken as a victory, a group of citizens has filed a lawsuit questioning the new law. And these companies, by most accounts, are not yet back to where they were one year ago, at the start of the 2015 NFL season, in terms of entry fees. Both companies, in the first week of the new season, saw a modest “overlay,” which is when a contest with a guaranteed prize purse does not fill up with users, but the company must pay out the prize anyway.

And brand partnerships are hardly a sexy story for anyone. As Pine admits, “Our business, the bread and butter is not sponsorship. I’m an added value. We are a significant revenue generator now, but we are never going to be the core of this business.”

Still, to bring on seven new brand partners all at once is an indicator that sentiment may be shifting away from the negative glare under which these companies operated for nine months. And there are indications the brands devoting ad budget to FanDuel are pleased: Machine Zone, the gaming company that makes “Mobile Strike” (Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in their TV ads), dipped its toe in the FanDuel water last March with a single two-week campaign to sponsor an NBA contest. The goal was strictly “to get as many downloads out of their campaign as possible,” Pine says. Now Machine Zone is finalizing a renewal with FanDuel for a longer commitment.

FanDuel, DraftKings, and also Yahoo (parent company of Yahoo Finance) all launched new features at the start of this NFL season that seek to place “daily” fantasy (where users draft a new team each week or more) in a season-long, recurring context. As a result, FanDuel says engagement is up. The company says its data shows that the average sports fan consumes 17.4 hours of sports content per week before playing FanDuel, and that figure goes up to 25 hours per week when playing FanDuel.

The integrated partnerships group at FanDuel only launched 15 months ago. “When I pitched [FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles] on the formation of the group,” Pine says, “I told him from the get-go that we never wanted this to look like a Nascar event. Now we’re getting some blue-chip brand partners. But we don’t ever want to disrupt the end-user.”

Indeed, as branded real estate on its site and app increases, FanDuel must pay close attention to whether the branding annoys users—if users walk, so too will brands.

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Disclaimer: Yahoo, the parent company of Yahoo Finance, offers a daily fantasy sports product.

Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite. Sportsbook is our sports business video series.

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