BigShinyThing

PartyGaming’s operating profits – expected to be $500m (£275m) this year – are made exclusively online, but it has built its Party Poker brand via conventional advertising on the Travel Channel in the United States.

What PartyGaming did in the States was create a shameless mix of programming and advertising to drive its brand. Party Poker signed professional poker player Mike Sexton as its public face back in 2001. Mr Sexton was subsequently recruited by the Travel Channel as host and expert pundit when the station acquired the rights to the newly created World Poker Tour (WPT) in 2003.

Party Poker flooded the programmes with ads featuring Mr Sexton, forming a direct link between programming and advertising that would not have got past the European regulators but that transformed the brand. Marketing director Vikrant Bhargava says that the site’s share of the online market went from 20% to 50% in a matter of months. At the same time, the number of players mushroomed, aided by Travel Channel viewers rushing off to play online. Even now, about 75% of Party Poker’s players are American and Mr Sexton is considered so integral to the brand that his contract runs to 2011.

Meanwhile, the UK has become deluged with online poker advertising and UK TV is about to hit by a wave of poker related programming. Next week Five will start broadcasting 90 minute highlights of touraments from the new European Poker Tour (EPT).In August Channel 4 plans to revive Late Night Poker – the series which first made poker interesting on TV by using under the table cameras to reveal the players’ cards. Two dedicated poker channels – Pokerzone and the Poker Channel – have launched on Sky during the past few months, and the established Challenge TV is now a poker-heavy format. This suggests that PartyGaming is set to repeat its trick (in some form) here in the UK .

This story and that of the Crazy Frog appear to question the belief that people are sick of being advertised to and that repeated messges on TV simply don’t work. Neither Party Poker or Crazy Frog had particularly creative or cunning ads – they just had a lot of ads out there.

Although Crazy Frog received over 400 complaints (mainly about how annoying it was and the repetition) it worked. Aided by its media agency MediaCom, the company decided to fire off 2000 messages a day – 83 times an hour – to convince consumers to pay £3 a week to receive downloads. Jamster claims that the ringtone has subsequently been downloaded 11m times. In the first two weeks of May, when its terrestrial TV campaign began, Jamster broke with TV advertising norms, clocking up a phenomenal 36,382 spots across all channels, according to Nielsen Media Research. The majority of these were for the same Crazy Frog ringtone. To put Jamster’s frequency into perspective, the next most frequent advertiser was McDonald’s, on just 9780. Backed by an estimated media spend of £10m for the month of May alone, the Crazy Frog irritated its way to the Number One slot and huge profits for owner Jamster.

Party Gaming has successfully applied a similiar advertising model of ‘keep hitting em over the head’; in this case forming a continuum between programming and advertising. And it’s coming this way …

The full PartyGaming story from The Guardian newspaper is here.