Top 10 UK egaming advertising campaigns: Numbers 5-1
eGR's countdown of the most effective UK campaigns of the last 10 years concludes.
1 Paddy Power
Print, TV, stunts (2000-present)
Don LaMonde: “Everyone in the outside world assumes Paddy’s marketing team venture outside their car park in Tallacht, sink 10 pints of Guinness and then the next morning whoever can find their scrap of beer mat has their campaign made. Not so. Paddy’s are a research, commercial and insight monster, chewing up every conceivable idea and putting it through the focus group grinder until it literally can’t fail. How hard can it be to come across as everyone’s favourite cheeky Irish scamp while being THAT accountable? And then to sell betting off a mock up of the Last Supper as a billboard campaign across the Catholic breadbasket? And then make it a runaway success commercially? It’s bloody hard.”
2 Bet365
TV in-play campaign (2008-present)
Sabin Brooks: “Used TV to ‘own’ the live betting category with Betfair grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory “ they had the technology but not the marketing skills. Bet365 went from the somewhat instructional, light-hearted but also incredibly well-branded ads featuring Bert Kwouk “ talk about leftfield choice of brand ambassadors “ and evolved the campaign to use Ray Winstone “ the bloke’s bloke telling the world that if he found it easy to bet in-play, so would you. Bet365’s single-minded and brave approach to TV aligned with investment in the product is what makes them the most popular online betting company today.”
3 Foxy Bingo
TV (2005-present)
LaMonde: “Building a brand from scratch is hard. Doing it with little cash is harder. Employing an animated fox with a £25k animatronic head sounds like downright lunacy, and should have been shelved at brainstorm #1. But it wasn’t. Integrated, memorable, appealing and successful, this did it all.”
4 Sportingbet
Not much (2006-present)
LaMonde: “Everyone knows Sportingbet, Blandford’s old puppy, does things well, doesn’t make mistakes, good at in-play, now worth £600m. So why is that? For all the clever stuff us marketing folk sell every single day, they just did everything else exceptionally well. And because of that, my #1 company for best campaign of the last few years in online gaming is a business that has largely done, well, none. Just imagine If they put some effort into marketing their brand?
5 32Red
Sponsorship (2006-2008)
LaMonde: “Ed Ware and his team have built what we all want “ an online gaming business with integrity that does simple things very well. Sponsoring Aston Villa was a big step “ costly, risky and with masses of room to go wrong. But Villa, like new keeper Shay Given, turned out to be a safe pair of hands. It shows what happens when a sponsorship is nurtured as a mutual relationship from both sides, and everyone benefits.”
Honourable mention: PartyPoker Million Cruise
TV (2002)
While not on the main list for being predominantly US-focused when launched back in 2002, broke Party in the US and provided the springboard for it to become a global brand.
Missed numbers 10-6? Click here for a recap.