Opinion: The power of TV advertising

Despite LeoVegas being an online and mobile casino brand, and amid the constant talk of advertising spend moving away from traditional media and into digital, we firmly believe that TV has every right to be a big focus of our user acquisition strategy. We think this should be the case for all gaming brands, big or small.

I say this as we kick-off our biggest UK TV sponsorship deal to date, becoming the sponsor of ITV2’s Celebrity Juice. Since launching in the UK in early 2014 we’ve sponsored TruTV and run two TV advertising campaigns, so it’s fair to say that TV plays an important role in our marketing activity in the UK.

TV complements all our other marketing efforts and aligns them all together to enable all our efforts to become a combined approach to acquisition.

Building trust

Obviously TV advertising brings with it the advantage of reach. Celebrity Juice’s exposure to more than 11m viewers last series clearly played an important part in our decision to sponsor the show. But TV has other, less obvious, advantages over online and digital-only platforms.

One important advantage is that TV helps to instil a level of trust between the brand and the consumer – a crucial element for any gaming brand, or indeed any brand that consumers will trust with their money.

For the team here at LeoVegas, showcasing the brand’s personality is crucial and TV is the most effective medium for conveying personality – as our Celebrity Juice creative will show. LeoVegas also benefits from a close association with such a fun and well-loved brand and one that’s so well aligned with our own personality.

Changing face

TV advertising is changing though, with more people than ever consuming TV on demand and online. From our experience the UK is still a bit behind Sweden, our home market, in terms of video on demand and streaming video on demand consumption, but it’s getting there.

With the UK being such a TV-centric market, a presence on TV was imperative for us to establish LeoVegas in the UK, but it helps when that activity is carried through online. For us this means brand exposure on the official site, sponsorship of online views of the show and social support through the shows popular social media channels.

While we don’t see TV losing its place at the centre of our marketing activity, we do see TV’s role in advertising and acquisition changing, just as people’s TV consumption habits change.

Although it’s obvious that TV’s future is multi-platform, the next job is to understand what those platforms will be. Will they be virtual or augmented reality? Will it exist on your watch? Whatever the answer is we’ll try to ensure LeoVegas is at the forefront.