Sports betting is still a popular industry in the United Kingdom, even if gambling advertising regulations are becoming stricter across Europe. Paddy Power has started a push to integrate itself into popular culture in order to differentiate itself from its rivals.
The Droga5 London agency, which is owned by Accenture Song and won the contract after a pitch earlier in the year, has produced its first piece of work for Paddy Power. The advertisement recounts an odd love tale involving two British football celebrities- player Peter Crouch and referee Mark Clattenburg, with parallels to romantic films like American Beauty and Dirty Dancing. The advertisement also features Crouch’s wife, model Abbey Clancy.
The goal of the campaign, according to the head of strategy at Droga5 London, Damien Le Castrec, is to bring back mischief to the brand. The company is well-known in the UK and Ireland for its occasionally contentious marketing gimmicks, which include everything from a hoax advertisement featuring a polar bear painted with the flag of England to a drive-through confession booth that was timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland in 2018.
Le Castrec stated, It’s not about a brand outspending its competitors; it’s about outsmarting them with concepts that spark conversations.
Instead of just being known as a betting company, Paddy Power wants to be known as an entertainment company, and its goal is to produce tales that are so popular that they get talked about in the WhatsApp groups and make fans excited, he continued.
The advertisement offers Paddy Power’s Bet Builder tool, which enables customers to speculate on particular outcomes of games as opposed to merely the final score. Le Castrec stated that the slogan for the campaign, Love football intimately, was inspired by the product’s attention to aspects of the game that are normally disregarded, in addition to the intense emotion felt by some fans.
Le Castrec said Droga5 chose to turn that concept on its head by imagining a plot line between Crouch and Clattenburg. The connection between players and officials is sometimes a difficult one. The stereotyped tone of a lot of sports and betting advertisements is also broken up by romantic humour.
Chief creative officer at Droga5 London, Shelley Smoler, stated that they aimed to make something that isn’t overly slick, overproduced, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Despite being a serious love story, it keeps the identity and light-hearted tone with which Paddy Power is known.
With nations like Belgium, Germany, and Norway cracking down on the marketing of the industry, it is becoming more challenging for gambling businesses to run advertisements across Europe.
Soccer players, celebrities, and social media influencers with a strong appeal to children under the age of 18 will no longer be allowed to feature in gambling advertisements in the United Kingdom, according to the Committee for Advertising Practice. The new rules will go into effect in October.
According to brand consultant Abhimanyu Mishra of Brandfizz, the gambling industry is extremely aggressive and competitive. Numerous large brands are making significant financial investments. But when one examines all of those brands and their execution, they will notice that virtually everyone follows the same practices. Through its advertisements, on the other hand, Paddy Power strives to position the brand in a way that makes it distinctive.
