Every player counts in the current economic climate, and online gaming companies are tapping into a previously unchartered territory – the female gambler.
With women representing on average just 5% of the punters placing sports bets, 20% of those playing casino games and a single-figure percentage of players playing online poker in the UK, online gaming’s much trumpeted goal of becoming a true mass market proposition seems a considerable distance off at this point in time.
Furthermore, the marketing strategies for high female participation verticals such as bingo, lottery and slots also appear to reinforce stereotypes. Research has shown that while men tend to gamble for the exhilaration of beating the house or their opponents, females are more likely to gamble for social interaction, entertainment and escapism.
Line Young Peteri is Betsson country manager for Denmark. A TV presenter, writer and blogger, she won Cosmopolitan magazine's Female Entrepreneur Award in 2007 for setting up and heading an IT company that she sold last year. She says females traditionally lag four to five years behind in take-up of male-dominated online areas. For her, operators’ current acquisition focus on males for verticals outside of bingo is “about revenues in the here and now, whereas focusing on girls is about the longer term”.
For all that, there are small signs that online gaming is fulfilling its potential to break with long-established land-based and interactive gambling patterns. As an example, David Gilbert, client services director at digital advertising agency TBG, highlights recent Comscore data that showed that 43% of the online gambling community was now female.
BEYOND BINGO?
While this is undoubtedly driven by the growth of low-staking online bingo, the average online female - a high earner, married, in her 30s and uses the internet for shopping and entertainment according to the research – obviously offers huge revenue potential to operators with the right products and marketing strategies.
Simon Collins, chief executive of Foxy Bingo’s parent company Cashcade, agrees that online bingo is female-dominated but says operators should not think this precludes men from playing the game.
Collins says Foxy Bingo has built up a “not insubstantial” male audience along the way, challenging the deep-seated preconceptions about male and female betting behaviour outlined above. Despite Foxy Bingo’s cherry colour scheme and overtly female-oriented TV marketing campaign, 30% of its players are men. Collins adds that Foxy should explore ways to monetise this customer base more actively.
“Guys like the community and the opportunity to chat to people. A lot of the things bingo has to offer (also) appeal to men,” he says.
Foxy Bingo has built up its two million registered users database across various brands and by embracing TV advertising and partnerships with media brands such as the DailyMirror newspaper and Closer magazine. And while the overwhelming majority of the readers it targets are female, the 70% female player base it has recruited on its Foxy Flutter casino site, basically a female-friendly re-skin of Cashcade’s Get Minted casino proposition, contrasts sharply with the 20% female customer base playing on Ladbrokes casino, for instance.
The conclusion to draw from such statistics is that a dedicated female brand, built from the ground up, will be much more able to leverage female participation in verticals with strong male associations such as casino, rather than being just another female-friendly tab on an operator’s portal.
For Collins, launching a female-friendly betting proposition would have to revolve around entertainment. “We’d probably start off with the Grand National and traditional entertainment-oriented bets, such as Celebrity Big Brother. I do think there’s a market there,” he says.
Collins understandably thinks Foxy’s female-friendly positioning in the market would give his brand an advantage. The high levels of female SMS voting on events such as Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here suggest there are opportunities in exploiting the obvious potential for increasing female participation in this area. “The traditional high street bookmaking brands strike me as being very alien to a female audience,” he says.
If Cashcade ever produced such a proposition, it would partner with an operator such as Paddy Power, Collins adds, because “it has mass market appeal without the association of being a staid, traditional high street bookmaker, and has pushed alternative, novelty bets”
ONLINE IS MORE FEMALE-FRIENDLY
Ladbrokes’ online marketing manager Robert Allan credits the operator’s sponsorship of the European Ladies Championship (ELC) over the past three years as having provided “a great female push” on its poker platform. According to Allan, the number of females playing has grown 300% over the last 12 months, and now accounts for 12%-18% of the customer base. He says the majority of those who qualified for the ELC via Ladbrokes freerolls had either started playing following a carefully targeted cross sell from the operator’s bingo platform or following an introduction from their husbands or boyfriends.
Everest Poker also recently published the rather astonishing statistic that 34% of online poker players in France are female. Ed Pownall, Everest’s head of PR for Europe, believes the participation gap between France and the UK is perhaps exaggerated by the fact that several leading UK poker rooms tend to recruit heavily from their 95% male sportsbooks. Pownall also thinks particular elements of Everest’s strategy in France have proved effective in acquiring and retaining female players.
He says: “France is relatively new to online poker, compared to the Scandinavian and German markets, and therefore people coming to our site are not getting completely fleeced with their first game. We’re also known to be suitable for beginners and intermediate players, so are perhaps less intimidating than other poker rooms, which is probably in itself more attractive to women.”
Writer and TV presenter Victoria Coren, also a winner of the 2006 EPT London event and a poker pro with Team PokerStars, thinks online poker enjoysdistinct advantages over its land-based form when it comes to marketing poker to a female audience. World Series of Poker Europe 2008 main event winner Annette Obrestad, of course, cut her poker teeth online before making the successful transition to the live tournament arena.
Coren explains: “Online poker has transformed the attractiveness of playing the game for women. It offers the opportunity to play from home, with zero risk of feeling physically vulnerable, with no worries about what to wear or what to say, no constraints of timetable, no travelling, and no problems with childcare as long as you play when they’re asleep!”
WOMEN AT THE TOP
Peteri at Betsson firmly believes that in order to sell online gaming products more effectively to females in the long term, operators need a mix between the sexes at decision-making level. Betsson, says Peteri, is strongly focused on getting more females in senior positions, and her recent appointment sees her join the country manager role in Sweden and poker operations manager for the group as females appointed to key decision-making positions in the company.
Peteri also suggests that operators may need to tailor the language of the game to fit more closely with that used by the female-oriented magazines or websites they choose to target.
PokerStars is also bringing someone in to deal specifically with introducing more women to the site, reveals Coren. She agrees with Peteri that targeted advertising across the media could be effective, but thinks it’s essential this is handled with care in order to allay unnecessary fears about the difficulty of the download or security of the game. Female poker players’ lack of trust of online poker sites when compared with males was, of course, one of the key findings to emerge from the recent Probability Great British Poker Survey.
It’s Coren’s hope that with the sponsorship of successful female players such as herself by the likes of PokerStars, “the public face of poker becomes feminised”, and more women are encouraged and inspired to take up the online game.
However, does she think these messages may in some way be undermined by the ‘poker babe’ culture that infuses the marketing campaigns of many of the leading UK and US operators chasing the core 18-45 year old male demographic?
“Of course it does. 100%. I remember an advert for one poker site, which was a close-up of a woman’s chest in a bikini top, with aces where her nipples should be. I very much doubt that attracted a keen wave of female players. Thank God, PokerStars doesn’t do that. On the team there is a selection of really strong women players, who express themselves intelligently, and dress attractively but with some eye to keeping warm.”
But despite some encouraging signs that the industry is starting to look at females as other than eye candy or decorative furniture for marketing purposes, it remains highly doubtful whether it has the will, or more importantly the resources, to attract women to its egaming products. Indeed, when times are as hard they are at the moment, operators will make sure the bottom line is looked after first and foremost and concentrate on recruiting men, who are more likely to gamble.
As one executive from a large UK-focused poker room says, the pressure and competition for poker’s existing core demographic means choosing female players to sponsor on the basis they may help them acquire new female customers “has to be weighed up against whether they’re going to get us as many column inches about our latest promotion in the newspapers our key male demographic is reading”.
In other words, women will remain part of the ‘nice to have’ demographic among major operators rather than the ‘must have’, for the time being at least.
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