Exclusive: Rank becomes official UK X-Factor gaming partner
Rank Group signs exclusive three-year deal with FME and SyCo to become the official gaming partner of the X Factor.
Rank Group has signed an exclusive three-year deal with Fremantle Media Enterprises (FME), in association with SyCo, to become the official gaming partner of the X Factor.
As part of the agreement, the operator’s brands, including Mecca Bingo, Grosvenor Casinos and Bluesquare.com, will all have the rights to create and distribute an exclusive X Factor branded online bingo game, as well as a series of slots and mini games. Mecca is currently working with its bingo supplier VirtueFusion to build an online variant with the first phase of the game out in the first quarter of next year and a second phase in Q2. This also comes at a crucial time when the UK bingo market is becoming increasingly competitive and Rank rival Gala moves over to the VirtueFusion platform next April after signing a 10-year deal with Playtech.
The operator, that has worked closely with FME and SyCo in the last few years on the Britain’s Got Talent (BGT) brand, will have the rights to use X Factor branding, including title graphics, theme music, logo and imagery in all marketing, communications and promotions across its retail businesses, websites, mobile products and social media channels. Rank Group will also be given promotional opportunities at X Factor events including 1,000 tickets for the series finale which airs live this Saturday as well as the coming two finales. Last season’s final pulled in a record 14m viewers.
Crucially, the agreement also allows for Rank to use the UK X Factor brand socially with plans currently being discussed between Rank, FME and SyCo, to take the brand and its games onto the Facebook platform between now and 2013. Facebook is known to have been in talks with a number of operators, including meeting Rank and other companies in London two weeks ago, to discuss the opportunity to open up its apps based model to real-money gaming in the UK some time in the near future.
Angus Nisbet, gaming director for Mecca bingo at Rank Interactive and Simon Murphy, head of gambling EMEA, FME, told eGaming Review the deal has been a long time in the making and that it represents both a massive coup, and a key part, of the operator’s online and retail strategy for the next three years.
“Two years ago we signed a partnership with Rank for Britain’s Got Talent which has been very successful,” said Murphy (pictured below). “More than a year ago both Rank and FME started to have had conversations around something similar with X Factor.
“It’s taken us a long time to put the framework in place and to get everyone’s approval because this isn’t a wide supply deal, parts of it are exclusive to Rank, in particular the promotional elements of the deal and also the use within bingo across all platforms. The X factor is a brand that we have been working with for some time and we’ve created brand around the product for slots, scratchcard and instant win games but never bingo.”
“These are the biggest brands in the country now,” explained Nisbet. “The X Factor is the biggest brand in the UK at the moment. If you do social mention, what people are talking about and listen to the radio, no one’s speaking about anything else.
“The reason it took so long is because we’re trying to do the deal as Rank, not just as the dot.com properties. We had an internal meeting three years ago where we saw that big events have a huge impact on retail businesses. The X Factor final is huge and an event people stay in for.”
Nisbet pointed to BGT as an example of how the operator has been able to leverage the SyCo-owned television show across all of its brands.
“BGT has been fantastic. It’s a Rank deal but we’ve most effectively leveraged it on Mecca. We have an online bingo game and online slot within the bingo client and then we did a promotion called ‘Mecca’s got talent’ within the bingo clubs which was very successful,” he said.
“We found that when people joined Meccabingo.com the second most popular game was BGT bingo. We then looked at the gameplay analysis and those that play BGT bingo over indexes with females from 18-34, which is important because it’s your core X Factor demographic. Hopefully that will crossover. It also over indexes with higher value customers, so there are a number of reasons why we’ve done this deal.”
One of the most intriguing elements to the deal however, and one of the most “exciting” according to Nisbet, is that as part of the agreement Rank has the opportunity to “take the brand into the social space”. This could, once a detailed strategic plan is in place, mean the UK X Factor brand being used by the operator as a virtual currency bingo, slots and/or perhaps mobile game on Facebook.
“Ultimately it’s exclusivity for a UK gaming operator to use the X Factor brand socially. Everyone’s talking about the social space and we’re seeing lots on it and it’s a really important string to our bow for next year. As you’ve reported Facebook is starting to look at this really seriously now,” he added.
“It’s very clear that brand is key from a social point of view. If you look at some of the offerings on Facebook at the moment, the success that some slots and bingo brands are having, for instance, in incredible. Some brands don’t mean anything outside the UK but it just shows good content does very well.
“Facebook at the moment is a free-to-play model, and will remain so for the time being, but it gives you the opportunity to target a global audience. It doesn’t come under existing regulation so there’s an opportunity to use a brand like X Factor on Facebook that has global recognition,” Nisbet added.
Five key points to the deal:
1) Rank becomes the official gaming partner of The X Factor.
2) The deal is split into two main elements. Promotional rights and product rights. It also exclusivity for the UK gaming operator to use the X Factor brand socially in the next three years.
3) Promotional rights include elements that will work in clubs, online, mobile and social media. Additionally, Rank will receive 1,000 tickets a year to the finale weekend with these tickets used to support promotions.
4) Product rights will work across online, in-venue, mobile and social. In addition to exclusive bingo rights across all platforms, the deal includes provisions for online, mini games, slots and scratch cards.
5) This is a major deal for both parties and represents continued expansion of a relationship already established via the agreement with Britain’s Got Talent and other online games.