The Mound - #24 - Beating the Odds

Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.

The CEO of Tabcorp, Adam Rytenskild, told a parliamentary inquiry that we've reached a "critical, line in the sand moment" for gambling advertising. But what he and all the adults in the room understand is that whether or not a group such as Tabcorp is allowed to advertise during a footy match is small fries, really.

As an example of just how creative these groups can be in their advertising, the AFR uncovered recently that the entrepreneurs behind online bookmaker Dabble have been running Facebook groups with titles like "Blokes Advice", "The Shark", and "Roughie Kings" - and then employing chat-bots to message young men from these pages with "tips" and links to the Dabble platform.

It's gross, but it's not criminal - which is a great summary of the whole sector, really - and this tension is the driving force behind the conversation we’re having, a proxy for the discussion we don't know how to have just yet. No, we don't think gambling should be illegal. But it's bad. So maybe we should just, I don't know, mess with their advertising?

Here’s how we fix it:

In 2020 Christiano Ronaldo off-handedly stated his preference for water over Coca-Cola, moving the sugary drink away from himself during a press conference. In doing so, he wiped approximately $1.6 billion from Coca-Cola’s market value.

The share price quickly recovered - but the whole incident really served as an excellent demonstration of celebrity's promotional / demotional power.

Really thinking about it, when was the last time you saw an athlete participate in an anti-gambling campaign? In an anti-anything campaign? You probably haven't because, sadly, the right thing is very rarely the profitable thing - and it's risky business taking a moral stance, especially when the whole aim of your playing career is to make as much money as possible before your ACL explodes.

So to properly mess with gambling we just have to create a singular, graspable and promotable brand for not-gambling. This way we can make known that any athlete's involvement with Not-Betting (a Good One company) is a wholly commercial, amoral, and even temporary arrangement. They're not saying that gambling should be illegal, they're not even saying that it's bad. We're just paying them to say that Not-Betting (a Good One company) is better.

You're welcome, Australia.