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PointsBet’s Drew Brees Lightning Ad Isn’t Shocking At All

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Most brands don’t deliberately try to attract controversy through their advertising. But sports betting brand PointsBet Sportsbook bucks that trend with its messaging, and it doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

To further the brand’s growth in the U.S. sports betting, it recently hired Dublin-based creative agency The Tenth Man for a year. The agency is led by Ken Robertson, the former “head of mischief” at Paddy Power. He earned that moniker as head of brand marketing at the Ireland-based sportsbook because of his reputation of creating provocative messaging that relied on guerrilla marketing.

As a challenger brand with a 3.7% market share in the U.S. sports betting category, PointsBet and The Tenth Man were looking for a bang for their advertising bucks through their recent controversial marketing stunt starring Drew Brees.

“We’re on a bit of a journey, and we’re looking to cut through and get some market share through being a challenger,” PointsBet director of digital strategy Jamie Coombes told Adweek. “To be a challenger brand, you need to disrupt the industry.”

In the Brees campaign, a clip posted on social media by a Venezuela-based filmmaker led viewers to believe that the NFL analyst and former star had been shocked by lightning in Catatumbo, Venezuela. Several reporters were left scrambling and wondering if Brees had actually been harmed.

Several hours later, PointsBet ended the hoax with a video of Brees proving that he was fine and that the whole thing was a marketing stunt.

The ad took about three months to plan and was shot inside a small studio in San Diego. A VFX production staffer who worked on Game of Thrones visualized the online clip. The director who posted the fake lightning clip is a friend of a friend of Robertson.

“We are not about conventional, safe advertising practices,” Robertson said. “We like to constantly innovate with what we do. And we especially are drawn to like-minded brands and businesses that have an appetite for what we do.

“In the U.S. sports betting space, there’s such a pull to a traditional 30-second ad. We saw that this type of activity punches above its weight.”

Looking to go viral

Coombes said there was an expectation for the stunt to go viral ahead of its launch on Dec. 2, but everything happened a lot quicker than anyone had expected.

The clip drew criticism from some on social media, but PointsBet knew what it was getting into when it came up with this strategy. Robertson doesn’t believe there was a deeply negative response to the ad. “It’s certainly been my experience over time that people who voice negative sentiment are always the first to the party,” he said. “This can give the appearance that overall sentiment for the campaign is negative. Detractors certainly can be noisy, but they’re not representative.”

For PointsBet, the ad brought heaps of free publicity. According to the brand, an independent analysis conducted by sports and entertainment analytics firm Apex Marketing Group valued the coverage generated by the ad across social media, newsprint, radio and TV at $5.7 million. Just $1.5 million of that coverage was negative sentiment.

The hoax video was viewed more than 5 million times. It was the No. 2 trending story on Twitter across the U.S. and was No. 1 on Google Trends. It generated more than 23,000 articles written and shared in its first 12 hours.

Though the brand didn’t get into specifics, it told Adweek that it saw a “significant” uptick in the use of lightning bets the weekend following the Brees stunt.

Icarus on steroids

Robertson’s creative philosophy is simple. He’s relying on controversy and flying close to the sun to evoke emotion from viewers. The formula led to his success at Paddy Power, where he helped grow the business in various roles over 17 years.

However, Robertson also has experience with crossing the line. He led a harmful 2014 ad during South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius’ murder trial for killing his girlfriend that offered “money back if he walks,” which was seen as threatening to women and promoting domestic violence. It was the most complained-about ad that year, drawing 5,525 complaints to the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority.

“The advert ran in British newspapers at a time in the court case when it seemed likely he may be found not guilty and the headline ‘Money Back If He Walks’ was meant to highlight the absolute absurdity and injustice of that,” Robertson said. “No doubt, it went too far caused offense. We got it wrong and apologized, learned from our mistake and moved on.”

PointsBet knows Robertson’s history and is willing to deal with whatever consequences come from this style of guerrilla marketing. Coombes said a big reason for working with Robertson was his experience with growing Paddy Power.

“Those learnings of when you go too far can still be applied to what we’re doing now,” he said. “So any of those learnings we’re able to then bring into how we strategize with the PointsBet brand.”



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