Paddy Power: Masters of mischief

At first you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve just ventured into the underwear section of a Marks and Spencer store. There is underwear everywhere you look – it’s even sprawled across the walls. Only these ‘smalls’ are emblazoned with the logo of Irish bookmaker Paddy Power rather than M&S. I have arrived in Paddy Power’s Museum of Mischief, a temporary erection in the centre of Dublin designed to celebrate 30 years of the operator’s most infamous marketing stunts – of which there are many.

The very first display shows off the pair of emerald-green boxers worn by Danish footballer Nicklas Bendtner. The waistband says Paddy Power and the bookmaker persuaded the former Arsenal target man to reveal them after scoring a goal at Euro 2012. It was Bendtner’s second goal during the match and, by all accounts, the Paddy Power marketing department was convinced he’d gotten cold feet when he bottled the pant-bearing celebration after his first. However, he plucked up the courage after netting his second, only to be banned for one game by UEFA and fined £80,000.

It was 2017 when the Paddy Power pants undoubtedly peaked. The operator somehow managed to convince boxing legend Floyd Mayweather to don the briefs at his weigh-in before the clash with Irish MMA star Conor McGregor, that many had called the fight of the century. Mayweather’s boxers were custom-made and reportedly cost £6,000. According to Paddy Power, the boxing champ was involved in the design process and rejected many prototypes, but he was eventually persuaded after learning how much they cost.

“We ended up flying out to Las Vegas to meet him in one of his strip clubs,” says Paddy Power, the affable Irishman who has been face of the brand for more than 15 years. “We showed him the pants and he just said, ‘Okay’. We couldn’t believe it. The pants have been the gift that keeps on giving. It is amazing what a pair of underpants can do,” he adds.

Lace relations

As we continue the tour of the museum, which is still very much under construction prior to its grand opening, we are confronted by a display cabinet housing the operator’s rainbow laces initiative which sparked into life before the 2013-14 football season. The campaign involved Paddy Power sending a pair of rainbow-coloured football boot laces to every professional player in England.

Paddy Power on exhibition at the Museum of Mischief in Dublin

The idea behind the provocative stunt, created in collaboration with LGBT charity Stonewall UK, was to highlight the lack of gay professional footballers and to spark debate on the terraces about inclusivity and diversity. “We wanted to tap in to those people that watch the Premier League but have the same attitude as your grandad where they just hate everything that is modern,” says Power. “It was also to challenge the perception that footballers are hard and definitely not gay. It is a statistical anomaly that there are no gay footballers – it is mathematically impossible.”

The operator also partnered with Arsenal FC on the campaign, and Gunners stars, including French fop Olivier Giroud, fronted a glossy video that caught fire online. “It was brilliant – we got so much traction,” says Power. “It all kicked off because it was done in a provocative way as it was aimed at not just the community that would be fully supportive of diversity, but also targeting the average football fan on the terraces in England.”

Away from the pants, this is the key to Paddy Power’s marketing strategy. Michelle Spillane, marketing and brand director, sums it up perfectly when she says: “The point of us and the thing that we do well is find that universal truth that appeals to fans and then dramatise it into massive fun for a really good cause. It’s not in too-worthy a way either, it is more for a bit of craic so that it feels real.”

The success of the rainbow laces campaign snowballed into Paddy Power’s primary marketing initiative for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. To poke fun at Russian President Vladimir Putin and highlight the country’s anti-homosexual policies, the operator donated £10,000 to the Attitude Foundation for every goal scored by the Russian national team.

The traders crunched the numbers and told the marketing department that they should expect to pay out £50,000 on the promotion, which was signed off by Spillane. Cut to the opening match, a 5-0 thrashing over Saudi Arabia, and Paddy Power was already heavily out of pocket, but the campaign really took off as a result. Russia went on to score 11 goals, but it was a price worth paying for the brand positivity.

Polarising opinions

While the Attitude stunt brought about nothing but positive headlines, Paddy Power had another trick up its sleeve for the 2018 World Cup that would prove far more divisive. Paul Mallon, the brand’s head of mischief, or head of brand activations to give him his official title, came up with the outlandish idea of spraying an endangered polar bear with the red flag of St George in a show of support for England.

Pictures and videos of the bear, freshly stamped with an England flag, surfaced on social media prior to the Three Lions’ first match against Tunisia. Slowly but surely, the controversy began to bubble, but in this era of ‘fake news’, tweeters weren’t sure whether the bear was real or a hoax. Spillane says: “People couldn’t believe what we had done, which was great as that is a big part of our stunts. It is a 72-hour window – we get in, we get out and create the buzz. We used all these 15-second videos to get it going over the weekend, but people had doubts that we’d actually done it.”

Paddy Power’s World Cup 2018 polar bear stunt

Most social media savvies would have forgotten about the polar bear until the Monday morning, only to find the animal wrapped around the front cover of the Metro newspaper (daily circulation of approximately 1.5 million). According to Mallon, this is when the stunt really took off and piqued the interest of commuters. “We were surprised by the reaction to the Metro. It was a new aspect for us in terms of print advertising and wrapping a paper – we had never done that before for a stunt and that is what worked this time round as opposed to a leak. The Metro really blew it out of the water and that was a learning curve for us. We try and learn something new on each stunt we work on.”

At first glance, the polar bear stunt was shocking, with the bookmaker receiving its fair share of abuse online, including from marketing outlets like Campaign Live. Atomic creative partner Dave Henderson penned an op-ed that suggested those behind the stunt should “hang their heads in shame”. He wrote: “This latest work doesn’t just cross the line of what’s decent in advertising, it clumsily barges through basic human decency and I hope some people are hanging their heads in shame this morning.”

But inevitably, the operator pulled out its trump card by announcing the stunt was for a good cause. This time, Paddy Power had collaborated with NGO Polar Bears International (PBI), and the supposed red cross was faked. The bear in the photo, Agee, was actually filmed on location in Canada by Framestore, the visual effects company that worked on Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar-winning thriller, The Revenant.

So, Henderson was left with egg. Pretty smart, right? Well, sure, but this wasn’t the first time that Paddy Power had lit the touch paper pre-tournament, only to announce a collaboration with good causes. This was the same tried-and-tested strategy used by the operator for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. This campaign, entitled ‘Shave the Rainforest’, duped audiences into believing huge swathes of the Amazon rainforest had been chopped down to reveal the rallying cry ‘C’mon England PP’ in the gaps left by felled trees. Photos of ‘deforestation’ drew some 35 million Twitter impressions, when, in fact, it was all a hoax by means of complex and painstaking image manipulation

Paddy Power received plaudits for pulling off a spectacular trick, yet in 2018 some critics found the polar bear stunt somewhat predictable, with Gravity Road’s managing director, Sarah Ellis, writing: “Paddy Power’s legacy of provocation marketing has achieved something rare: a brand behaviour that consistently cuts through pop culture to land a mischievous slap in the face. However, the lengths they now have to go to, most recently with polar bears (or not as it transpires), shows how difficult this is to sustain and how fierce competition is. Once they were out on their own; now, subverting news culture is a standard mode in all sectors.”

I ask Spillane if she finds the constant pressure to go above and beyond exhausting. She replies: “Our ambition is always the same: create the controversy, spark the outrage, and get people talking about the issue before revealing the stunt which always supports a good cause. There is always pressure but we love that. We live for it. Stunts and mischief are in our DNA, it is a massive part of what we do but as we evolve, people are coming to us and asking to partner with us around their event or festival to create more of a buzz.” The latest example of this would be the Champions League of Darts, where organisers asked Paddy Power to get involved for the September tournament in Brighton.

On reflection, Paddy Power’s head of PR, Lee Price, says the Shave the Rainforest stunt is his favourite of all time. The operator suitably pays tribute to the campaign in the museum too. Price asks if I want to dangle a reticulated python over my neck and shoulders for a picture for EGR Marketing. I recoil slightly in horror, then politely decline. It feels as though I have been transported to a city zoo as I check out the rest of the Shave the Rainforest tribute. There are tree frogs, sticky lizards, a tarantula and even giant snail racing. I guess you need at least one event to place a bet on.

Content is king

Whilst I enjoyed the tour, the serious marketing talk only begins once we enter a quiet room out back. It’s the kind of place you’d get dragged into by an uncompromising bouncer for being too drunk on a night out. After all, the museum space used to be a nightclub. “In our very first conversation we said we need to do more content,” says Spillane, making no bones about the operator’s marketing strategy going forwards, which was implemented as soon as she arrived nine months ago from Irish state broadcaster RTÉ. She adds: “That has been a big thing for us this year. We have really started to expand our content remit with a big new leap. We had eight million views for our ConIFA World Cup content. Our social media footprint is one of the biggest, so we started to evolve that this year and ask where we can take it from a content perspective.”

Paddy Power marketing and brand director Michelle Spillane

Indeed, Paddy Power sponsored the ConIFA World Cup, an international football tournament for nations not recognised by FIFA. Unusual countries and territories including Tibet and Matabeleland took part, and the operator drove home its focus on content marketing by producing a video documentary covering each team. The 15-minute YouTube videos were a smash hit and the footage was eventually turned into a bona fide TV series by Catalonia’s TV3.

“While we are very committed to our own social distribution channels, we have also found the partnerships are very good for us,” says Spillane. “Partnerships with Unilad, Goal.com and with TV3, for example, who took a one-hour documentary on ConIFA which we edited down for them.”

PR guru Alex Donohue has been critical of some of the industry’s content marketing as it doesn’t always deliver a positive ROI for operators that do it lazily, but Paddy Power is the exception to the rule. He says: “I think they were doing content marketing with or without knowing it a long time before content marketing was even a buzzword in the industry. It’s formatted perfectly for the method of consumption. It’s shot for mobile and all done to consume on your phone. It’s funny and it makes me laugh, that is where they stand out.”

Two become one

Paddy Power is also unique in that the brand has a perfect human embodiment to front its campaigns in Mr Power. He comes across as a likeable Irish rogue and punters automatically think this guy is the face of the brand. Sky Bet has tried a similar strategy with broadcaster Jeff Stelling, but with Power, the fit is more natural. Unlike Stelling, who was already famous for anchoring Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday, Power’s role and stature has grown alongside the operator’s development. Power, who fronted the operator’s mini ConIFA series, says: “In many ways, obviously the name helps, but I don’t know if my personality has changed into the brand or if the brand took on the shape of my personality.”

Power has worked at the operator for 24 years. He started out as a board marker in his local retail outlet before bookmakers had TVs in shops. He has worked in almost every department, but his true calling is in brand, which he has loved working in for the past decade or so. “This is just how I am, so it is easy for me,” he says. “If it was a boring brand of photocopiers that I had to represent then my job would be a lot harder. But this is fun and edgy, and you get into trouble sometimes, which is great.”

And Power is likely to take on even more responsibility as a result of Spillane’s content-led approach, further entrenching his role as the face of the brand. He spearheads the operator’s video content as a presenter and is already the voice of the bookmaker on the radio. Spillane says: “Paddy is gifted in front of a camera. I worked in broadcasting and there are broadcasters with many years of experience that don’t do as well. Just give Paddy a mic and tell him he has to talk about some shite for an hour and it will be grand and engaging.”

A live crocodile in tribute to the operator’s Shave The Rainforest campaign

Power, retreating modestly into his chair after being showered with such lavish praise, adds: “It suits me personally the direction that we’re going in and the decision to make more content. I like that and really enjoy it, so it’s selfish but it works. It is compelling and exciting. There is a lot of more important marketing stuff that is numbers based and statistics based, but I absolutely love this.”

Power’s enthusiasm for the operator’s content-overload approach is clear. He says: “The marketing world has almost gone full circle. It felt like in the very recent past that creativity in marketing was just not important anymore. It was all about numbers and brands meant nothing. Now, there is a lack of creativity in the marketplace, so the opportunity for a company like ours is great. People are crying out for something entertaining because marketing has been too generic for the last decade.”

With a new emphasis on pumping out even more content, Paddy Power will continue to delight and offend in equal measure, stirring up debate as it always has. The operator’s strategy is to go hell for leather on creativity and pump investment into the best asset they have – the brand itself. Power concludes: “Anything different gets shouted down by the judge and jury that is social media these days. It is good to be brave. Put your hand out and prepare to get slapped is what I say.”