Betway: 'Dream Team FC'

In 2019, the RGA (Remote Gambling Association), a consortium of the UK’s most-recognised sports gambling companies, agreed to a self-imposed ‘whistle-to-whistle’ ban on TV advertising in live sport (before the 9pm watershed).

The ban, endorsed by the Government after a staggering 90mins of gambling ads were broadcast during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, was designed to combat the rise of ‘in-play betting’ and the swelling sea of gambling addiction – of which there are an estimated 430k sufferers in Britain. It is unarguably a worthy cause, and one that Betway were also fully committed to supporting with their own marketing from the start of the new 2019/20 football season.

However, there was one small problem. Advertising in live sport – football in particular – was popular because it works.

With over £200m being spent on advertising in live sport on TV each year across the category, Betway were suddenly faced with the daunting challenge of replacing a proven channel that drove both new customer sign-ups and wagering and accounted for 60%+ of their annual marketing budget, almost overnight.

Having analysed the data around the behaviour of sports bettors (specifically football fans) through predictive analytics – we discovered that approximately 51% of all acquisitions (new customer sign-ups) were acquired within 3 hours of ‘Tier 1’ (big event) football fixtures.

Given we couldn’t be around those games in the conventional way (i.e. advertising in the game live on TV) we quickly realised we needed to find a solution that would allow us to have an active role within the 3hr window of fan’s pre-match ritual.

We set about looking for a partner that could offer us a direct line in to football fans’ pre-match ritual at scale. There were many potential suitors, but one stood out from the rest: News UK and The Sun’s Dream Team FC – the UK’s biggest commercial fantasy football game.

Betway became the headline sponsor for the 2019/20 season and with it, the partnership gave us an opportunity to engage with over 1.1m football fans that tweak their fantasy teams ahead of every single match week.

But not satisfied with simply ‘badging’ the game and running standard display ads, we wanted our partnership to improve the overall experience. So, alongside bespoke content across socials, we set about integrated Betway’s APIs into the game itself in a first-of-its-kind data exchange.

We created a real-time odds widget, bespoke to players within your team that served contextually-relevant offers based on player selections, as well as ‘boosted odds’ relating to the most popular players that were transferred into teams across the game each week.

Leveraging the rich data and insights that the game provided created a self-fulfilling prophecy for Betway, informing which bets were most appealing for certain audiences and helped shape future offers for upcoming fixtures. But most importantly, it allowed people to bet on their selections and hunches with Betway creating a fantasy football integration like no other. Despite the season being impacted by Covid, the partnership became an entirely new revenue stream for the business, surpassing all KPIs.

Results:
• Over 6,500 new customers directly attributed to partnership.
• Over 1.4m new bets placed as a direct consequence.
• £2.7m worth of additional wagering.