Maximising the marketing opportunity in the absence of sport

It’s April 2021; Liverpool are leading the Premier League table by three points; Man City have a game in hand and five other teams are battling it out for the remaining Champions League places.

The Masters is days away and the Grand National, won by Tiger Roll in last year’s virtual screening, is building up to its annual excitement with new registrations and FTDs driven by upbeat, positive campaigns with welcome offers across all media.

Oh, and three key England players are facing a race against time to be fit for the rearranged European Championships. Last year’s Covid-19 is a distant memory and normality is appreciated now more than ever.

The word ‘unprecedented’ currently features in every newspaper article and government speech but I don’t think there is another word more apt right now. I’d challenge anyone in our industry who thought it was possible for sports to be switched off globally – and with such speed. One by one, countries started postponing and then cancelling events. As this escalated, you feared looking at your phone for notifications or WhatsApp messages announcing further bad news.

In the grand scheme of things, sports and gambling pale into insignificance and should rightly take a backseat as countries battle against the virus, especially when you see pictures of NHS Nightingale at the ExCeL centre – those of us that attend ICE can really appreciate the size and scale of the operation. A meeting at S9 when you are stood at S1 is a sizeable walk – fill that image with beds and you soon realise this pandemic is on a scale that we have never seen before.

But what can brands really do? Become experts in Belarussian football? Use US horseracing as a lever or simply, for those that can, push customers towards casino? There is a need for businesses to drive turnover and everyone has been clinging onto whatever they can. Basic segmentation and the golden rules of marketing were being ripped up just to maintain the ability to communicate. But let’s not think for one minute that trying to force behavioural change is going to have any long-term positive impact on any of our KPIs.

A large proportion of punters will protect themselves and won’t want to be gambling on unfamiliar sports or slots they’ve never previously played. There will be some who are intrigued by casino and this insight may become valuable for future promotions. But for now, most operators are sitting back, choosing to switch off media channels and re-allocate spend to later in the year.

Maximising time at home

In such a fast-paced environment, we constantly wish we have more time and now we are sitting at home… we do. It’s a time to review the agency brief once more; work on the customer journey improvements or focus on that piece of content which was due for deployment. When we are back to some normality, we should demonstrate that we haven’t stood still and that we used the time wisely to make improvements across all touch points.

In time, the sector will recover and there is hope that we could recover quicker than some industries. Talk continues on the radio and in newspapers that ‘sport is nothing without the fans’ and ‘we should wait until stadiums are filled again before recommencing’.

I don’t disagree, but right now sports fans are longing for a live match or tournament whether it be behind closed doors, on a desert island or in the middle of nowhere. It really doesn’t matter. Sport lifts people and right now we could all do with a lift.

Dan Towse has overseen new identity and proposition for the Marathonbet brand since 2016