How Winamax Extended Their Brand Reach Beyond The Traditional Matchday Window

Overview

Winamax is an online poker and sports betting company based in Paris. They are the leading poker site in France and introduced sports betting to their offering in 2014. In 2018, the company entered the Spanish market, where it continues to grow.

Winamax has long-standing associations with sport and, in particular, football – thanks to their sponsorships of a number of high-profile football clubs in France and Spain. Partnerships with the likes of Strasbourg, Lens, Lille, Reims and Troyes in France and, more recently, Granada in Spain have made the Winamax brand synonymous with football.

Despite the clear associations with football in the real world, Winamax wanted to extend their brand footprint into the virtual stadiums of Football Manager and engage their target audience with localised messaging designed to build brand awareness and capture attention – without intruding on their gaming experience.

The innovative partnership saw Winamax run campaigns across two markets whilst utilising Bidstack’s age-gating solution to ensure that the messaging was delivered responsibly and in compliance with industry standards.

Campaign Objectives

With their associations to football already well established, Winamax set out to extend their reach beyond real-world stadiums and into new channels with an ‘always-on’ campaign that extended beyond the traditional matchday window.

The campaign, which ran localised messaging for the Spanish and French markets in the iconic Football Manager series, utilised Bidstack’s exclusive access to the gaming inventory and their ability to age-gate advertising to ensure that the messages were delivered to the correct audience in a way that wouldn’t be possible with a real-world activation.

Winamax set out to build brand awareness amongst their target audience in a way that complemented the playing experience – with advertising delivered onto pitchside LED billboards. They wanted to build their brand equity through ads that were designed to capture attention and help to drive positive perceptions around their market-leading sports betting odds.

To measure this successfully, Bidstack enlisted the help of Lumen Research, who undertook an attention study, utilising eye-tracking technology to build a better understanding of how the ads performed when benchmarked against other channels.

Campaign Strategy

Winamax identified gamers, particularly data-driven football fans, as the ideal audience to reach in-game.

Statistics from Global Web Index show that 39% of football fans love playing video games and that 29% of French gamers enjoy gambling as a hobby (55% higher than the general population) – while in Spain, this applies to 27% of gamers (70% higher than the general population).

With gaming identified as the ideal route to reach their intended audience, Winamax began identifying appropriate games to run their campaign across. In Football Manager, they found an ideal place to share their “best sports betting odds” message and thanks to Bidstack’s age-gating solution, they were able to deliver this message with confidence.

Only gamers aged 18+ were able to view the in-game ads that were delivered onto LED pitchside hoardings as the action unfolded around them. Delivering ads in this way enhanced the realism of gameplay, offering gamers the kind of experience they would expect to see in stadiums at live sporting events or through a televised broadcast.

Campaign Highlights

Winamax succeeded in extending its brand reach beyond the traditional matchday window, engaging a highly-attentive audience across two of its key markets.

Key campaign highlights include (study findings from Lumen Research):

• Winamax’s ads were delivered to more than 69k unique players who played, on average, 3+ sessions per day.
• Ads were seen by 89% of the audience, 1.7x display norm.
• Average dwell time was 2.1 seconds, 1.6x the display norm.
• 43% of the audience engaged with the ad for 2.1 seconds, outperforming the display norm of 11%)
• 40% of players spontaneously recalled seeing the Winamax ad, with no misattribution to competitor brands.
• When prompted, 62% of players recalled the Winamax in-game branding.
• 79% of players felt the Winamax ad was suitable for Football Manager.
• 76% felt Winamax is a good quality brand.