Q&A: Barni Evans, marketing director, Paddy Power
Paddy Power's marketing director talks social media and advertising.
>EGR: What would you say have been the most seismic shifts in the way you market since arriving at Paddy Power back in 2001?
BARNI EVANS (BE): I joined what was effectively no more than a family organisation then. It is now more multi-layered, has multiple businesses, multiple geographies and it’s a beast in comparison. Prior to 2008, it would have been a gradual proliferation of channels as we learned what worked and what didn’t. Since 2008, the big change was the advent of pay-per-click on Google and TV advertising both at very similar times. That’s what changed the face of the marketing mix. The thing for people to get their heads around in the next 12 months will be mobile PPC.
EGR: When eGR spoke to you last year, you said that no one in the sector had yet nailed social media. Have you seen anything since then to change your view of this?
BE: No, including us. Everybody has done a bit more, everybody has probably learned a few bits and pieces, but I still don’t think that anybody hand on heart would say, “We are absolutely kicking arse here”. Even the best brands in the market, if you look at their Twitter followers, or any metric that you would want, and they are in the low tens of thousands. Yet they’ve all got customer bases of hundreds of thousands, and their advertising reaches millions. So in the grand scheme of things, for a sector that spends as much as it does and has so much to talk about, we certainly haven’t found the nirvana.
EGR: What is Paddy Power doing to enable it to benefit from social media marketing, if and when it does finally start to pay dividends?
BE: We hired a plane for Cheltenham for the day and tweeted clues as to where it was taking off and at what time. That has good brand interaction. You get to hang out with 50 people you would never have met, they all tell their mates, and it gets PR coverage, but can I point at a graph or do a calculation that delivered me X percent ROI? I just can’t do that. Until somebody finds a way of getting the scale it is not going to become a major budget item.
EGR: Paddy Power is known for the irreverent humour of its campaigns, but how does it ensure a steady flow of these ideas? Do you find yourselves working with multiple agencies to ensure this?
BE: The one-word answer is focus. We spend a lot of time trying to come up with stuff. We give ourselves more time on that than other companies would. Regarding agencies we work with one creative agency for TV, Big Al’s Creative Emporium, but we cast the net wider on more stunt-related marketing. We are very open-minded about who we talk to. We get lots of people saying, “I’ve got this exclusive idea, it’s brilliant, no one has ever heard of it before, and we want a load of money before we will tell it to you.” To which we say: “We can’t be writing you a cheque before you tell me what your idea is, but I can promise that I will be fair to you and honest. If it’s an idea we already had or we tried a few years ago and it didn’t work, then I’m not going to pay you any money. If it’s genuinely new, then I will pay you what you think it’s worth and we will move on from there.” Some people are willing to trust us on that, others aren’t, and they take their ideas elsewhere.