Stand-out stunts
Bodog's Ed Pownall, who has been in the gaming industry for more than 10 years, looks back at the first days of Blue Square and some of the industry's stand-out stunts.
May 2000: Goodwood racecourse and a press conference to launch Blue Square, the UK’s first online bookmaker.
At the time we had around 50 members of the press but only two used the internet. Spokesmen for the major High Street bookmakers explained that people preferred to feel the cash in their hands and, frankly, at the time we weren’t sure they were wrong.
With any launch you make a lot of mistakes and we were no different. It was April 2001 and, thankfully, still with no competition from the major firms, we spent a tonne of money advertising the Grand National.
The campaign worked, the website didn’t. We ground to a halt at around midday (four hours before the race).
But also we were the first to offer odds on Big Brother, Pop Idol and, of course, our own Live Hamster Dragster racing at a time when foot-and-mouth disease stopped racing and claimed Cheltenham.
When Paddy Power launched we called them Green Square because they copied everything we did “ most famously replicating our Tour de France odds (amazingly another first) when we had deliberately quoted Colin Montgomerie rather than the leaner Sven.
Sadly, after the sale to Rank, Blue Square appeared to lose its quirkiness. Since then Paddy Power has set sail on that same irreverent course, made it their own and is now the undisputed king of headline grabbing.
I admire them enormously, not just for its success, but also for its consistent strategy spanning 10 years; most other firms have had multiple changes of direction and message in the same period.
Over the years there have been some really stand-out stunts and some fantastic failures. My favourites include:
Like: When Ladbrokes finally got online nobody could deny its David Campese Rugby World Cup coup: after dismissing England’s chances he walked down Oxford Street with a (branded) sign saying “I admit the best team won”. This was a genuinely global news story.
Like: Bet365 deserve special mention for the way it came from nowhere to become arguably the UK’s biggest online bookie. It didn’t go in for ‘eye-catching’, or even ‘clever’, with its creatives but it got their message across and the simplicity has paid huge dividends.
D’oh!: When 888.com launched it felt as if it owned every billboard in London. Its media spend must have been huge, but did it work? I don’t think it did, but equally the product rather than the marketing seemed flawed; at the time it had no sports book, a huge risk for the UK.
D’oh!: Betfair’s launch statement of ‘Death to the bookie’ whereby it paraded a coffin around the City of London which a sheepskincoated ‘bookie’ was a misguided prophecy and one can’t help but enjoy the fact that it now offers bets as the bookie itself.
This article appears in the new issue of eGaming Review. For a free trial subscription, click here.