During the sport hiatus, can casino pull in the crowds?

For most people, sports betting is more or less off the table right now – unless they fancy getting up to speed on the Russian hockey league pretty quickly.

And as you might expect, given the hiatus in the sports calendar, many of the metrics we track for the sector are therefore pretty stable. As brands cut short or rein in marketing campaigns in light of the coronavirus, we’d expect to see less volatility in metric scores between brands, but also across the sector as a whole.

However, something which we found pretty interesting was a metric you might expect to see slide under the circumstances – Ad Awareness (Which of the following brands have you seen an advertisement for in the past two weeks?). Yet the score taken across the sports betting industry as a whole has actually stayed pretty stable. That would indicate that remaining campaigns are getting noticed more or that historical campaigns stick in the memory for longer than we might think. Either effect is interesting and would benefit from unpicking more at some point.

Received wisdom has it that the shutdown of the sportsbook is an opportunity for other forms of gambling. As people can no longer punt on sport, they turn to other ways of entertaining themselves – specifically other ways of having a flutter.

Let’s see how far that logic stretches.

Are sports gambling and lotteries, for example, too far removed from one another on the skills spectrum for there to be any relationship between the rise of one and the fall of another? Our data would certainly suggest that that’s the case.

In fact, Consideration among the general public for the major lottery brands has fallen considerably in the past two weeks – certainly as much as it has for some major bookmakers. Consideration (When you are in the market next to use or visit brands, which of the following would you consider?) for playing the National Lottery has fallen more than six percentage points in the last two weeks, with EuroMillions down by about the same.

Lotto is down slightly less (two points), while Consideration for the People’s Postcode Lottery is down almost five points and the Health Lottery down three.

So, far from lotteries benefiting from sports betting’s misfortune, the opposite seems to be the case. They too are less of an attraction over the past fortnight.

Casino uptake

So, what of an activity less far removed from sports betting – online casinos? Like sports betting (but unlike lotteries) casino games can demand an element of skill and judgement alongside their chance dimension.

Well, this sector tells a different story – one that suggests support for the hypothesis that this is the sector most likely to benefit from the sportsbook downturn.

In fact, each of the top five casino brands we track have seen increases in Consideration among the general population over the past two weeks.

In all but one case, the upturns have generally not been dramatic (Betfair Casino is the exception here, although its score increase has historical precedent for the brand). But the fact that the effect is seen across the group may be a signal that companies with a diversified offering that includes casinos may be better placed to ride out the coronavirus outbreak than those who only offer sports betting.

That said, there can be little doubt that everyone involved in sport has a strong desire to get the show on the road again as soon as possible, whether we’re experts in Russian hockey or not.

Charlie Dundas is commercial director at YouGov Sport, the sports and entertainment division of global research and insight agency, YouGov. YouGov Sport tracks the public’s perceptions of sports events, leagues, teams and athletes every day in markets across the world on a daily basis.