UnluckyForSome confirms winner of divisive 'bingo wings' competition
An underwear model who has modelled with Jordan, a former catwalk model and a body double for UK TV's Dawn French and Fern Britton are among the entrants beaten in a competition to find the face of the controversial Show Us Your Bingo Wings ad campaign
AN UNDERWEAR model who has worked with Jordan, a former catwalk model and a body double for UK TV’s Dawn French and Fern Britton are among the entrants beaten in a competition to find the face of the Show Us Your Bingo Wings ad campaign.
The controversial campaign, launched by bingo ‘super affiliate’ UnluckyForSome in July, centred on ‘bingo wings’, the British slang term for loose underarm fat on typically older women, and involved a competition to find an “obese young woman” to feature in it.
The campaign frustrated some other bingo marketers, who privately complain that it runs counter to their efforts to sell the game to a younger demographic. Bingo has been the subject of major investment in recent months, with PartyGaming having acquired Foxy Bingo owner Cashcade, new Power 50 entrant Chili Gaming seeking a bingo provider for the soon to be liberalised French market and Virtue Fusion to launch a bingo product based on the Deal or No Deal TV show.
Adverts for the face of future UnluckyForSome TV adverts were placed in UK job centres, and ten shortlisted candidates were invited to a ‘Bingo Wings Idol-style’ casting session in London on Thursday last week.
Actress Iliana Flade (pictured), 38, from London, won the competition, beating over 200 applicants.
A spokesman for the site said: “All we asked for was that the winner had a bubbly personality and was a larger than life character.
“We knew that asking for overweight or obese applicants was a bit risqué as it had never been done before but we wanted a woman who acknowledged her size and was totally happy with it.”
Flade will receive £1,000 prize money as well as being given a £100,000 (pro rata) contract.
A study of the bingo market by market research business Mintel earlier this year suggests that the efforts of other marketers may have paid off, concluding that “the past decade has seen a radical change in the age and social status of the typical bingo players [with] greater numbers of young and affluent people drawn into the market.”
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