What’s in a brand?

You don’t have to be a businessman to understand how important a brand is. A brand is the face of a business that can take on a life of its own through marketing campaigns and public perception. For example, Paddy Power is a fun and casual bookie, while William Hill can be seen as a slightly more mature sports betting platform.
Of course, we could sit here all day and evaluate each piece of marketing from different operators and discuss what image it builds for a brand as if we were back in English lessons in school – but it would exclude one important factor. These would just be our opinions and thus would not reflect the wider public perception of these businesses.
For example, where did the more ‘mature sports betting platform’ line come from regarding William Hill? Well, a YouGov poll on The Most Popular Gambling & Betting Brands (Q4 2023) ranked William Hill as the 7th most popular brand for Baby Boomers (1946 – 1964), behind the likes of the People’s Postcode Lottery and Mecca Bingo, while Paddy Power was all the way down at 14th.
If we change the filter to only include results from Millennials (1981 – 1996), Paddy Power is now the fourth-most popular brand while Mecca Bingo has fallen down to 15th place. Not only that, but 46% of Millennials had a positive opinion of Paddy Power, while only 11% of Baby Boomers shared the same sentiment.

How can a brand build more trust with its audience?
One method is for a company to align itself with another respected entity and build respect through association. This is one of the reasons many brands use ambassadors for their products. Do you like Luís Figo? Then you’ll probably pay more attention to Digitain’s sportsbook, seeing as the football legend is plastered all over its marketing.
But not every company can hold a great reputation at every point in its lifetime. A prime example is Barstool Sports, a digital media company that has its own ‘Controversies’ section on its Wikipedia page. These range from copyright issues, off-colour remarks from its owner Dave Portnoy regarding women and, quite frankly, things we can’t talk about here.
So how did Barstool Sports land a multi-year exclusive sports betting partnership with DraftKings?

It’s in the numbers
Controversies aside, Barstool Sports has 5.6 million followers on X (Twitter) and 16 million on Instagram – no small follower count, considering the official DraftKings Instagram page has only accumulated 215,000 followers. If DraftKings wanted a company to promote its odds to a large audience, then Barstool Sports, regardless of how some may perceive it, is a great contender.
Although, it’s also worth mentioning that Barstool Sports has been under new management over the past few years. In 2020, Penn Entertainment bought a 36% stake in the company for $163m and bought the remaining portion of the company in February 2023 for $388m.
Under Penn Entertainment and The Chernin Group, Barstool launched its mobile sportsbook, which handled $11m in wagers during its launch week. Not only that, but Penn Entertainment also announced that it would match all first-time deposits by donating to the Barstool Fund, which raised $4.6m for small businesses in Michigan. Barstool Sports also went on to become the title sponsor of the Arizona Bowl and partnered with several local and international companies.
Perhaps it was this distance from the original owner (Portnoy) that allowed Barstool to rebrand. After all, many of the controversies that had arisen from the company have come from comments he’s made. Despite this, Penn Entertainment sold the company back to Portnoy for $1 last year after it rebranded the Barstool Sportsbook to ESPN Bet. A bold move and one Penn will have to work hard to recover from, considering Q4 revenue from its Interactive segment was down over 80% from Q4 2022.

Where does this leave Barstool?
The affiliate is now in a relatively unique position. It has the chance to start again. The brand has gone through its ‘bad boy’ era under Portnoy in the past, then was catapulted into the world of sports betting beyond journalism through Penn Entertainment. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for Barstool Sports to maintain that momentum by announcing its partnership with DraftKings a mere 30 minutes after its non-competition clause ended with Penn Entertainment.