Women and FanDuel Casino are the ideal couple, thinks FanDuel Group. Hence today, FanDuel “ramps up” its marketing campaign targeting women. To that end, the online gambling operator posted two commercials yesterday on YouTube. They feature women. Yet the ads still don’t include their voices.
The “Winning is Undefeated” portion of the FanDuel Casino marketing campaign by Mischief @ No Fixed Address “goes live today,” says the New York-based ad agency.
Mischief Head of Development Oliver McAteer‘s email to Bonus today includes a press release saying today’s ramp-up “includes two hero TV spots as well as social content, radio, and OOH across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia.”
OOH is marketing shorthand for “out of home,” meaning billboards and bus stops will bear the ads.
Consumers will see ads titled Break Up Win and Parking Win in the states where the FanDuel Casino brand is available. While gamblers in Connecticut are using FanDuel technology, the brand there is Mohegan Sun Casino.
FanDuel’s iGaming Ambitions
The brand awareness campaign has a larger purpose than signing women up to play roulette, blackjack, slots, and live dealer games.
Today’s press release states:
The campaign will amp up FanDuel Casino’s brand awareness, as the company continues to work with states on legalized, regulated and taxed i-gaming expansion.
US online casino expansion is an interesting concept for this campaign, considering it’s not airing in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or New York. Those are the states that industry insiders expect to see legalize iGaming next.
In the short term, though, this campaign’s primary purpose is to try to appeal to women.
FanDuel announced in July that it hired Mischief because the No. 1 online sportsbook in America wanted to build upon FanDuel Casino’s success with women. About half of the players choosing the No. 3 operator in the US online casino marketplace then were women.
One impact of that was that women, who tend to prefer playing slots on the app, almost flipped the most popular FanDuel Casino game from blackjack to slots in Pennsylvania.
Women and FanDuel Casino
The brand with a woman at the helm may need to do more work on its concept of pairing women and FanDuel Casino.
FanDuel CEO Amy Howe did say on Nov. 16 during Flutter Entertainment‘s FanDuel Capital Markets Day that the brand wants to increase its internal diversity, as well. Flutter is FanDuel’s primary owner.
However, Bonus watched Break Up Win and Parking Win and viewers don’t hear women’s voices in either commercial.
A man also narrates their stories and, ostensibly, their thoughts.
In Break Up Win, a woman listens to a man break up with her. The narrator says she’s happy, because she wants to break up with the man. Yet other than that woman’s look of bliss as he leaves, the moment when her female server brings her champagne to celebrate is the most active voice beyond the narrator’s.
In Parking Win, the woman’s role is to smile as the narrator tells her story. She’s glad her parking meter is broken.
Each video includes this description:
Even a small win feels like a monster victory. It’s unbeatable. And you’ll find that same feeling in spades on FanDuel Casino, the #1 rated online casino app. On FanDuel Casino, winning is undefeated.
The ads do make an effort to represent women’s perspectives. So did Sex and the City. But, like that HBO series eventually did, the campaign may have further to go to understand a woman’s voice.
That show had women in the writer’s room.
It’s unclear if Mischief does.
The press release about the ramped-up FanDuel Casino campaign mentions Pete Lefebvre and Ryan Stotts, who are Mischief creative directors.
It also quotes Daniele Phillips, vice president of brand strategy at FanDuel Casino:
We have big ambitions for FanDuel Casino and this is a huge step forward for our business. Fanduel has connected with sports fans and, in doing so, has earned the position as America’s #1 Sportsbook. We have an incredible opportunity to build on that success with FanDuel Casino. This is our first big, 360 brand platform work designed for longevity. It’s also the first of so much work to come with our friends at Mischief — who’ve proved why they’re so highly celebrated with this campaign.
Phillips and McAteer didn’t immediately respond to the Bonus question, “Why is there a man narrating?”
So even though women and FanDuel Casino already find each other, considering audience metrics back in July, the latest representations of their relationship – Break Up Win and Parking Win – may still be finding their voice.
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