Sportsbet increases grip on footy audience with Seven AFL deal
Sportsbet has struck a multi-million dollar deal with Seven West Media to sponsor the 2017 AFL season and hopes to mirror what it has achieved with a similar deal with the NRL on Nine and extend its influence to a new audience.
The new deal gives Sportsbet total coverage of the winter football codes on free-to-air TV and fills the void left by CrownBet, which instead is focussing its efforts on its $10m AFL partnership and advertising on subscription TV with Fox Footy.
The deal also comes as Seven moves to reduce the number of wagering companies featured in AFL telecasts this year.
Barni Evans, chief commercial officer of Sportsbet, said at first glance its decision to join Seven was a “standard package of rights”.
However, with Seven still achieving big numbers across the year with its AFL broadcasts, he said it was an asset worth chasing.
“It’s absolutely a premium media asset,” Evans told Mumbrella. “It gets right to the heart of footy in the southern states and therefore its an absolute appropriate asset to go for and as a consequence is heavily sought after.
“Like in anything where there is a scarcity of resource and only one brand, or one person or one company can gain that resource that person is going to go through a competitive process and is going to have to work hard for it.
“We think that we that we can represent out brand really well in that space. Our experience with channel Nine in the NRL equivalent broadcasting is that we have represented the brand well.”
Tom Waterhouse’s sponsorship of the NRL on Nine changed the rules for the betting agencies on TV.
Evans said there had been a evolution of wagering advertising since the era of Tom Waterhouse’s interjections into NRL games on Nine led to a change in rules governing how betting was advertised.
“With the NRL equivalent broadcasting we’ve represented the brand well and provided a bit of entertainment and relevant content for NRL fans and we’d expect to be able to do the same here.
“It’s worth looking back three or four years before we entered the NRL space, there was a big furore over Tom Waterhouse. We thought long and hard about stepping into those shoes because it was a fairly tense environment at that point in time.”
He said the brand did not want to further anger NRL fans upset at the level of intervention into Nine’s broadcasts that Waterhouse had represented and came up with a completely different approach with a view it needed to be sensitive to the free to air environment.
The deal is for 12 months meaning Sportsbet can reassess its strategy at the end of the season.
He said while Sportsbet now had complete free-to-air coverage of the winter football codes, the agency would continue to focus on a broader choice of sports from international soccer to horse racing.
Seven’s network director of sport sales, Patrick Moloughney, said the network was proud with what it had achieved with Crownbet, but was looking forward to the new partnership.
“The marketing platform offered has been strategically developed to provide strong but considered exposure for wagering companies involved,”Moloughney said.
“Seven made the decision at the end of last year’s Grand Final to reduce the amount of wagering organisations that would feature in AFL telecasts for the 2017 season – less is more sometimes.”
Crownbet’s decision to link directly with the AFL has been described as a tactical decision to better align its spending, but if it chooses to avoid the Seven network, will see it be able to reallocate funding to its members rewards programs as look at NRL clubs on an individual basis.
At the same time, Seven is now working on the launch sponsors for the AFL Women’s League, AFL-W, the the network already seeing strong sponsor support.
Disgusting and greedy
AFL have no morals only money hungry then tell everyone to gamble responsible
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wrong Mark…. it’s business.
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Its not gambelin. its taken cash off idiots
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