Why did gambling operators ignore the Women’s World Cup?

One month into the new Premier League season and the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup seems like a lifetime ago, but the tournament is likely to live on in the minds of marketers.

The event was huge from a brand perspective, and the innovative marketing campaigns during the competition helped to ignite a cultural shift that propelled women’s football to the forefront of everyday public discourse.

Brands were clambering over each other to capitalise on the trend and get their slice of the action – Barclays Bank signed an eight-figure deal to sponsor the Women’s Super League, while Coca-Cola teamed up with Channel 4 to launch a brand-new weekly women’s football show.

But it was Nike that arguably made the biggest impact during the tournament. The sportswear giant’s Dream Further campaign exploded across social media, while the jersey for eventual winners USA became Nike’s bestselling football top of the entire season – across men’s and women’s football.

https://twitter.com/Nike/status/1147912201652469760?s=20

However, there was one group of brands conspicuous by their absence – bookmakers.

National newspaper debate in the UK rages on about whether gambling’s relationship with football is poisoning the sport, such is the level of saturation of betting sponsorships within the men’s game. But when it came to the Women’s World Cup – a global event watched by more than 28 million people on UK televisions – the bookies were nowhere to be seen. But why? Did they not expect the Women’s World Cup to be as big as it became?

“No, definitely not, and I don’t think anyone within our industry that says they did is being fully honest,” says Ladbrokes Coral marketing director Alexis Zamboglou. “The support for the Lionesses in the UK was truly incredible and I believe it was a missed opportunity for an industry which is usually quite agile and dynamic in capitalising on where inspiring sports stories exist.”

There are those within the industry who did spot the tournament as a significant opportunity however. Dave Walton, VP of sales with live score affiliate app Forza Football, was keen to partner with bookmakers during the tournament to promote Forza’s equality messaging around the sport.

Walton says: “Because women’s football is such a big focus for us, we tried to push that message to existing partners and highlight that it was another big event coming up, just as the men’s tournament was last summer, but nobody went for it, nobody at all. Everyone’s response was ‘it is not a big enough event’ or ‘we don’t think there will be any traffic’ and this was from all tiers, every single one,” he adds.

Backfiring budgets

Publishing partners, including Facebook, found in the lead up to the Women’s World Cup that operators had already spent the vast majority of their H1 and Q2 marketing budgets on tried-and-tested events in the sporting calendar – particularly this year – as both the Champions League final and Europa League final were contested between English teams which drove up betting in the UK.

But Walton is adamant that this reasoning is little more than an after-the-event excuse. He says: “There is always money left. These companies obviously have their budgets, but if the right opportunity is there, they are a gambling company at the end of the day – they have money and they will put it in. I just don’t think that any of them were aware of how big this event could be.”

Zamboglou agrees, insisting that rather than pinching the marketing pennies, gambling firms were just one step behind the giant global brands on this occasion. “I think rather than budget constraints, it was the lack of prioritisation and the failure to see the brand opportunity in an event which was set to capture the imagination of the UK public,” he says.

“I don’t think any betting brand truly invested in the tournament to the same level as other categories and brands like Nike,” he adds. “Over the last two years, with Ladbrokes and Coral we have tried to align our brand stories to the events which truly matter to the UK, whether it be commercially-driven or not, and that’s why it’s a real regret for me that we didn’t have a stronger focus on the Women’s World Cup.”

In the UK, every game of the Women’s World Cup was broadcast on the BBC. The BBC was instrumental in drumming up interest pre-tournament, with its impactful slay in your lane campaign (later the subject of a copyright case) that set out to address inequality in professional sport. Unlike commercial rival ITV, the BBC has no adverts, which would have meant less room for the bookies to advertise odds as they do on BT Sport and Sky Sports during the domestic season. But why wasn’t this used as a trial run before the voluntary whistle-to-whistle ad ban kicked in in August?

Zamboglou says: “I don’t think we needed to advertise against these matches to land a message, in fact quite the opposite, as we have more than enough advertising elsewhere, I would argue. In fact, our campaign that did run throughout the tournament for Ladbrokes utilised our access to male audiences through print and digital media.”

✨ The new home for women's football ✨

Bringing you every @BarclaysFAWSL game live… for free.

— Barclays Women's Super League (@BarclaysWSL) August 6, 2019

When the no advertising question was put to Forza Football’s Walton, he replies: “That is true but there are so many different media channels available. All operators have giant affiliate networks, brands and apps that they could have easily used to portray a message. There wasn’t that opportunity on TV, but that is a very small stone to try and hide behind as to why they didn’t do anything,” he adds.

Lessons learned

But there is no use crying over spilt milk. Bookmakers would barely have had time to groan in frustration at the missed opportunity before the Premier League kickstarted again with normality restored. The key question now is whether the women’s World Cup made a significant enough impact to keep the sport in conversation alongside the men’s game for a sustained period.

It would be a shame if women’s football peaked with the 2019 FIFA World Cup, rather than it being the catalyst that kickstarted a global phenomenon. As Walton says: “Operators must treat the men’s and women’s games, for advertising purposes if nothing else, as an equal opportunity.”

There is now a huge chance for bookmakers to become a significant part of the women’s game. Having missed out once already, they should not miss out again.