Operator offline ad spend insights: Q1 expenditure trumps Q4 2020
Richard Downey, SVP global new business for branding agency The Specialist Works, analyzes the latest offline advertising spend among top operators as marketing budgets grow in Q1
As states have opened up to online gaming and betting over the past six months, it seems an interesting time to look for trends in how a selection of the main operators have used offline media to drive their acquisition efforts.
Of course, while the majority of ad spend by all of the operators featured here will go into online performance channels, it is interesting to see that offline media still plays a significant part in marketing and advertising strategies today. And investment in certain areas seems to be growing quarter on quarter.
The data in the tables shown here is taken from Nielsen Ad Intel, a tool used by media buying agencies such as The Specialist Works to understand the levels of investment by brands into offline media. The numbers are all estimates but prove a useful indicator for relative levels of expenditure by key operators.
Looking at the data, it is interesting how consistent the brands were during the last quarter of 2020 and majority of Q1 2021. By and large the same operators used the same channels and split their offline advertising budgets in the same way.
*All data taken from Nielsen Ad Intel. All numbers are 000’s
** Data for Q1 2021 does not include last week of March
There is clearly a ‘Big Three’ when it comes to the US offline marketing spend. And those are of course; DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM.
The Nielsen data proves that TV is still by far the most popular route to an offline market for operators.
Spend levels in the tables above are a combination of all the different TV options that are available in the US, from national network stations, to Spanish language, regional networks, and local cable options.
The one fast growing broadcast channel that is not included in this data is connected TV or over-the-top (streaming platforms). Nielsen currently counts that as a digital spend channel and as such it is extremely difficult to produce spend estimates.
The overall spend for the majority of Q1 (data goes up to March 21) is 5.4% higher than that of Q4 2021.
In the case of DraftKings and FanDuel we have removed the spend estimates that Nielsen had put against their DFS campaigns. And with DraftKings running two 15 second ads in the Super Bowl in February, had we left that DFS spend in the overall totals will of course have been much higher.
It is also worth noting that some operators are live in more states than others, meaning spend for the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel will be more spread out than say bet365 which is only present in New Jersey for now.
The only offline channel that saw spend across all operators researched, and in both timeframes, was outdoor.
Given the ultra-localized opportunities that come with the channel as well as the low entry level of investment both in terms of ad creative and media spend, this is not a huge surprise to see.
Radio is the offline channel with the second most allocated spend. And this would be spot spend, not taking into account things like program sponsorship or the increasingly valuable podcast ad market.
As 2021 progresses we will continue to monitor ad spend performance to track trends but expect that ‘Big Three’ to keep getting bigger and spending more on advertising.