The Smoking Gun: Centrepet; Gav Grimes dissects the JackpotJoy ad...
TSG recounts the short-lived career of Centrebet's PR "machine" and eGR stays ahead of the pack...
You’ve only gone and killed the dog!
Sometimes the best laid plans can come undone, as one sports betting business found out last year when a run-of-the-mill PR exercise went a little wrong. Centrebet’s head of marketing and gaming Luke Brill told TSG recently: “I bought a greyhound last year for Centrebet, called it Centrepet, and it died of a heart attack. We did this massive PR thing about Centrepet, but everyone kept asking, “How is Centrepet?”. I don’t know anything about greyhounds. I went to some bloke’s greyhound farm in the middle of nowhere, and asked, “Which is a good one?”.
“It was like that scene in Snatch where they go to buy a dog. It looked all right. The problem is you can’t buy a greyhound once it has raced, so you can’t change its name. You have to buy one that hasn’t raced, so I just bought one they said was good, and literally, three weeks later, it had a heart attack. Everyone has been saying, “You killed the dog”, and I was like, “That’s because the dog wasn’t any good.”
Unfortunately it seems that Centrebet’s promotional tactic was on its last legs before it even started. You could even say they made a dog’s dinner of it. Or that Luke Brill went back to the office with his tail between his legs.
One step ahead
eGaming Review always likes to stay ahead of the game, but even we were shocked at just how ahead we were after putting up a blog written by James McNab, Stan James’ head of mobile on EGRMagazine.com. Later that day, several hours after the blog had been posted, the eGR team received a press release from Stan James announcing the appointment of its first ever head of mobile… James McNab. Talk about dedication to eGR “ McNab hadn’t even been officially announced in his new role but had already written for us. Expect an interview with the new CEO of Gala Coral tomorrow”¦
Stick to what you know
The British mainstream press is often way off the mark when it comes to spotting and discussing trends within sectors that it knows very little or nothing about. So it came as no surprise that The Times last month bizarrely asked its media editor to cover, as it labelled it, “Britain’s middle-class obsession” with gambling following Nielson’s figures showing there had been a 40% jump in the number of Brits visiting egaming sites in the last year. So let TSG get this straight, because almost half of online gamblers earn more than £30,000 it’s suddenly a middle-class affair? Right. But there’s more. Shock, horror, 46% of online gamblers “ “a stark contrast to male-dominated casinos” “ are women, and many of the estimated 2,000 websites employ ‘female friendly’ pink colour schemes. Please let eGR stick to egaming and we’ll let you stick to the rest.
Get out of my bingo hall…
After much PR-hype the new Jackpotjoy ad is here. An industry pioneer, Gamesys is a solid company, and Noel Hayden is no mug, but I’m speechless after having seen the new ad. The concept is “the Queen of Bingo” and Barbara Windsor (Babs for the rest of this piece) is the newly crowned head of the bingo state… she exited Eastenders last month less than 15 minutes before the ad first aired on ITV to maximise the impact. But that’s the only thing I like about it.
There are two versions… the first is short and excruciatingly painful and unwatchable a second time, while the longer version is simply excruciating. The main characters are Jack, the cartoon double of Daniel Day Lewis’s character ‘Bill the Butcher’ in Gangs of New York, his instantly forgettable sidekick Joy, (can you see what they have done there?) who is lowered down on a papier maché moon, a cackling Babs (the Queen of Bingo), and a small crowd, the majority of whom look as though they’ve been teleported from outside the Big Brother house and celebrate as if they’ve all just won Euro Millions.
It’s got a nice Vaudevillian theatre feel but Jack and Joy talk nonsense for the first 20 seconds on the stage whipping the insatiable crowd into a frenzy before Babs makes her entrance. There is a terrible bingo anthem that I predict right now will not catch on.
I know I don’t fit the stereotypical bingo player, am not in their demographic and they must have done some research before splashing the cash but this is lowest common denominator stuff leveraging the fact that everyone has heard of Barbara Windsor. It’s so bad I have had to mentally block out some of the content but just in case we needed another cliché, I do have vague recollections of the crowd shouting “Oi, Oi Jackpot Joy”.
The ad, the music and Babs wig are all abysmal, it looks super expensive, there is no actual product info and little or no calls to action in the longer edit. But it’s going to be a smash as Babs is a national treasure. Creatively for me, however, it’s a mess.
Gav Grimes works at McBoom, the egaming marketing agency. You can get in touch with him at gavin@mcboom.com.