Finding a voice: BetBright on its brand-building strategy

With half of all Premier League football teams now sponsored by a gambling operator, finding mass-market opportunities for online sportsbooks to get their voice heard is now more diffcult than ever. For new UK-facing sports betting companies, this problem is particularly acute and many are looking beyond football, and even traditional horseracing sponsorships, for new avenues through which to build their brand.

BetBright is one company to pursue a strategy along such lines. Although now almost five years old, the Dublin-based firm still feels like a relative UK newcomer and has only in the last couple of years begun to ramp up its marketing capabilities in one of the world’s most competitive regulated markets. This has included niche opportunities such as the BetBright Cup at Cheltenham, which taps into the rivalry between British-trained horses and their Irish rivals, and the operator’s sponsorship of the FM17 project.

Conor White, BetBright’s marketing communications manager

The idea behind such partnerships, according to the Irish bookie, all boils down to creating a real connection with the customer. EGR Marketing spoke to the operator’s marketing communications manager, Conor White, to find out more about BetBright’s marketing strategy and how it is aiming to position its brand in a crowded market.

EGR Marketing: What is currently the focus of BetBright’s overall marketing strategy?
Conor White (CW): At BetBright we’re very fortunate that we’re comprised of a group of experienced people, both from within the gambling industry and from elsewhere. One of the main focuses of our marketing strategy going forward will likely be to apply the skills and the knowledge employees have brought with them from other industries into our own. For example it’s not inconceivable that the gambling industry may lag behind certain industries across a number of elements affecting a customer’s experience. The fun part going forward is for us to identify these elements and attempt to apply them to the lifecycle of a customer in the gambling industry.

As an example retail sites use a number of predictive algorithms to tailor the information they display to you based on your past preferences and behaviours. This is something we’ve already achieved to some extent with our Recall product which can provide a customer with markets based on their previous behaviour. This is only the first in a long line of planned development work aimed at improving the overall customer experience which in turn should improve retention and loyalty rates among customers.

EGR Marketing: And what about on the branding side?
CW: This time of year, we are focused on our horseracing sponsorships; beginning on New Year’s Day in Cheltenham to the actual Cheltenham Festival in March. We have a strong core racing demographic audience and that is basically a three-month window to influence that audience as we try to create some brand loyalty and differentiate ourselves from the competition. We also have our standard sponsorships, which we utilise for press conferences, invite customers up to the box and run competitions across social media for tickets.

EGR Marketing: How are you trying to position the BetBright brand more broadly?
CW: I think we are about facilitating the sports fan’s experience. The way I see it, gambling is attractive because we’re sports fans and we like having a bet on this race or that race because it increases our experience of the sporting event. If you have money on a horse, it’s far more exciting than if you’re at the track just watching it as a spectacle. What we’re trying to do is recreate that.

The first goal of any brand activity is to be remembered and then things like retention come after that. A lot of the advertising that’s being done can be seen as quite passive. However, if we can meet fans in their environment – on social media, at matches and on the way to game – to improve the overall experience into something they remember, I think that is a huge chunk of what we would aim to do with any brand activity.

EGR Marketing: How successful has the BetBright Cup been?
CW: This is the third year of our sponsorship of the BetBright Cup and it’s the only sponsorship at the Cheltenham Festival that allows us relevance on all four days across all 28 races. We thought it was a pretty innovative sponsorship at the time because it was relatively cost effective and we’ve increased our level of exposure compared to the rest of the industry.

We utilised it properly last year for the first time with our Irish and British captains and the aim was to make it a light-hearted take on the Irish and British rivalry; Cheltenham is quite a serious event with punters placing serious money on serious horses. We achieved huge exposure across Sky Sports, At The Races, Racing UK and the national media – so from a PR perspective it was a massive success for us.

BetBright has secured a number of horseracing sponsorship deals

EGR Marketing: Are you now hiring more people in branding and investing more in that side of the business?
CW: Absolutely – there is a concerted strategy to push the brand out there. It is probably one of [BetBright’s new CMO] Anthony’s [Broadhurst] biggest priorities since he joined, and there is a lot more being invested on the brand side of things. We have our sponsorship of Football Manager 2017 and we are now looking at ways to ramp that up during the last part of the football season by basically creating a roadshow.

We are not exactly sure how it will look yet but we’ve secured investment to expand what we’re doing with FM17 and are looking at contracts with them. That will be our branding focus for approximately three months after Cheltenham and we will then be looking at various other opportunities throughout the summer when there is no racing or football on.

EGR Marketing: What external factors are altering BetBright’s strategy?
CW: On the whole, we are not necessarily interested in just having our name on something; we’re more interested now in the activation of any sponsorship. Most of these sporting environments are commercialised now and so advertising is saturated. Whether it’s on a shirt or billboard, there is almost a level of immunity that we have built up to it and it doesn’t affect us in the same way or create that emotional, tangible connection between the brand and the people who have come to see it. So we are trying to get beyond that.

FM17 is a good example of this. Those guys are going out to tens or hundreds of thousands of people, who are incredibly dedicated and switched on with a game that they play every day. What I’m interested to explore is whether we can add investment to that and increase the exposure and scale of what they’re doing, while facilitating a larger audience through our participation. I think that is probably more the way we want to go in terms of creating a connection or an experience between ourselves and customers.

EGR Marketing: And this includes what you’ve got planned in the long-term?
CW: It may not be in that guise – we’re not going down the road of fantasy football non-stop and sponsoring every event. However, that level of interaction in that line of environment is where we want to bring our message, rather than displaying our message in less active environments. For example, we already know that most people interact on Facebook and a certain amount of pages that are followed is where the interaction is taking place.

I think our challenge is to find those places and try to place ourselves there, rather than simply splashing banner ads across any environment.

EGR Marketing: What do you look for in brand ambassadors? How successful has Jimmy Bullard been?
CW: You’ve got to be careful with ambassadors and rather than getting an ambassador to fit the brand guidelines and behave in a certain way, you have to select an ambassador who fits your brand guidelines organically. That level of fun and banter is how we’ve tried to run all the events we’ve done lately and it was a natural progression for us to speak to Jimmy. To a certain extent he is the embodiment of what our football product is trying to be and at LAC he was incredibly popular among football fans. He’s a cheeky chap but underneath that experience there is a love of football and a fan.