14/03/2017

Betfred Launches Game Of Thrones Inspired TV/Online Campaign Ahead Of The Cheltenham Festival

Betfred has launched a television and online advertising campaign for Betfred a week before the strat of jump racing’s annual Cheltenham Festival showpiece meeting.

 

The creative is inspired by global hit TV show ‘Game of Thrones’ and features a simple series of animated stills of horses, jockeys and trainers.

 

The campaign revolves around a spearhead 30-second commercial led by a 6-second teaser spot.

 

The ‘Great Generals Ready the Troops…Cheltenham is Coming’ teaser was first posted on the betting brand’s YouTube channel on (28 February)

 

 

This ‘Cheltenham is coming..’ ad was then followed up by the core ‘Cheltenham is Here!’ commercial launched on 13 March.

 

 

The spots are also running across video on demand, digital and social media.

 

 

‘The Cheltenham Festival is one of the most important racing events on the calendar for us and we wanted the creative to reflect the intense drama that takes place on the racecourse,’ explained Gemma Strath, head of marketing at Betfred.

 

‘The team at Zut has demonstrated a clear understanding of the brief and has once again delivered a campaign with real stand out. We are thrilled with the whole approach from the creative concept to the final execution.’

 

‘The intensity of the racing that takes place on the course at Cheltenham is at the very heart of this campaign. From the crowd’s famous roar before the first cavalry charges to the bravery and determination of the jockeys, Cheltenham is adrenaline filled and very ‘battle’ like. We used this as the inspiration behind the creative,’ added Mark Hancock, director at Zut.

 

The ad campaign is supported, as per usual, with a wealth of brand-created, bet-related bespoke content: from video interviews with trainers posted on its YouTube channel a week ahead of the meeting,

 

 

 

to low latency and real-time social media festival colour, comment and commentary.

 

 

 

 

and all the usual digital/social promo pieces pushing the brand’s transactional platforms such as its on-site outlets,

 

 

its race tips and odds and links to its digital betting platforms,

 

 

and its live TV stream too.

 

 

Activative Comment:

 

With record ticket sales and on-track attendances (of more than 260,000 over the four-day event) for the last six years, the festival seems to be in great shape.

 

But most marketing eyes will be watching the TV viewing data for the 2017 meeting.

 

Indeed, official festival broadcaster ITV will be hoping that Betfred isn’t the only betting brand to spend big budgets on commercials during the 2017 festival.

 

And we don’t just mean the meeting’s official gambling-related sponsors – who include Coral, Stan James, Betway, SkyBet and SunBet – but the entire British and Irish betting industry.

 

The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster will need many more of these kinds of bookie campaigns with the country’s big gambling brands investing in 30-second spots throughout the whole meeting if its new horse racing terrestrial TV rights investment is to pay off.

 

After all this is the first year of its new horse racing monopoly deal which saw it take most of the major UK races away from previous incumbent Channel 4 with its own £30m rights gamble.

 

It has been reported that ITV’s strategy led to a 50% increase in racing rights fees when it swooped in on Channel 4’s previous terrestrial TV racing rights monopoly (the previous broadcaster having paid only around £20m for its package).

 

For the first few months of the new deal, most of ITV’s racing coverage ran on its lesser known ITV4 channel, but the Cheltenham Festival marks the point at which its move back into racing gets serious.

 

After all, ITV’s investment was primarily based around the sport’s biggest events: the Grand National, the Derby, Royal Ascot and The Cheltenham Festival

 

ITV is pulling out the stops for its first Festival: with a 90-minute Opening Show magazine programme at 9.30am each day on ITV4, plus all the live race coverage from lunchtime and the channels team is also reported to have put in a lot of thought into in-air features for the extended gaps between races.

 

While ITV hasn’t publicly stated how much its festival ad spots are selling for, or what its target audience numbers for the meeting are, it will certainly be hoping to comfortably beat Channel 4’s final year viewing figures from 2016 – which failed to reach 0.89 million TV viewers for Gold Cup day and averaged 0.66 million viewers across the four day festival (a 9.8% audience share).

 

As is usually the case in gambling marketing, the Cheltenham campaign isn’t BetFred’s only marketing initiative currently running on ITV.

 

Amongst its other ongoing work, Betfred is simultaneously running a national football betting TV campaign, also developed by agency Zut, starring former England defender Stuart Pearce,

 

Links:

 

Betfred

https://www.youtube.com/user/betfredsport

https://twitter.com/Betfred

https://www.facebook.com/Betfred

http://www.betfred.com/

 

Zut

http://www.zutmedia.com/



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