It is a well-known fact that fantasy football players skew towards a male demographic that is between the ages of 30 and 50. If you are a motor oil company, this is a demographic that you need to target. Starting in September, Castrol sponsored the Sporting News’ Fantasy Football site, and got some great results. Traffic to Castrol’s website soared and even surpassed long-time rival Shell. As compete.com has pointed out with some great data, this increase in traffic for Castrol is no fantasy (head over there if you want to some pretty graphics).

Castrol’s sponsorship went well beyond just banner ads. The entire site was skinned with Castrol logos and its colors. Plus, it cleverly branded some of buttons and site features. The result was that the Sporting News was the number one referring site to Castrol (even more than Google, how many sites can say that?). For Castrol, clearly this was a very successful campaign.

It is great to see an example of advertising working in the fantasy sports industry. But, something to note is that Castrol’s presence was a persistent one. Frequent visitors associated the brand with the fantasy football game and eventually needed to check out Castrol’s site. If you just run banner ads, you do not get that kind of response. If you fully integrate with a site, you can still get some great results.

By the way, the site now appears to be sponsored by Prestone anti-freeze, another product that appeals to that mostly male demographic.

Kudos to Sporting News and Castrol for developing a relationship that worked for the both them.