After spending the last two months promising to make you rich, the chief executive of FanDuel admits his daily fantasy sports site may have gone a bit overboard. “We definitely got creative burnout pretty darn quickly,” said Nigel Eccles in an wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, in which he also touched on regulation, taking the company public, and the potential for a merger with competitor DraftKings. “People, when they saw the ad for the 87th time, they thought, I’m sick of this,” he said.
The ad blitz was more than annoying. It was expensive — FanDuel has spent more than $100 million on advertisements since August — and raised the profile of daily fantasy sports at the same time that questions began to surface about the basic fairness of the games. New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone cited the advertisements in mid-September during his call for a hearing on the legality of daily fantasy sports. Soon the question of regulation was a national topic of discussion, even inspiring a question in the most recent Republican presidential debate.
Eccles acknowledges that regulation is on the way — and even says its a good idea. Together with DraftKings and the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, FanDuel recently hired a lobbyist to push for favorable state legislation. Eccles thinks that a handful of states will pass consumer protection laws in the next year. While regulation could come with an additional tax burden, “that’s not come up as much as we’ve thought,” Eccles said. “I assumed it would have been high on the agenda.” This story originally appeared on Bloomberg