Play. It's why we're here

Sky Vegas is to launch a new campaign and ATL brand platform today, which aims to build an authentic connection by shunning overly optimistic category cliches to celebrate play in the everyday. The campaign embraces winning and losing in a category first, with a new, true-to-life, more responsible direction that has been built from industry defining research. The work is spearheaded by the Who Wot Why independent production company ‘studiowww’.

The groundbreaking new research, led by Sky Vegas, reveals that it is in the unremarkable moments in their day that consumers look forward to playing, preferring to play for excitement rather than for the chance of big wins.

Breaking away from the traditional razzmatazz of the online casino category, the ‘Play. It’s why we’re here’ campaign features ordinary people experiencing winning and losing in life’s most mundane daily moments.

The platform features unique 60” and 30” films, which will air on TV from today. The 60” will also appear in cinemas from 26th January, a call to arms for life’s playmakers to embrace play in the everyday. The films feature a slow-motion leap over a puddle, a dramatic switch of supermarket queue, a widescreen biscuit dunk, with each small moment becoming cinematic in scale.

The campaign is a complete departure from the category’s traditional hype-led advertising, which typically features white male frontmen on bright neon sets, with flashing lights and wide-grinned promises of big wins. The new platform aims to forge a realistic, honest and transparent connection with customers by reflecting that, as the market leader, Sky Vegas understands the genuine experience of playing online casino.

The work has been produced and directed by Who Wot Why’s studiowww production company. Media planning and buying for the campaign was handled by EssenceMediacom.

Jonathan Lloyd, Head of Gaming, Brand and Propositions at Sky Vegas, said: “We’re thrilled to be launching our new ‘big entertainment in the small moments’ platform and shaking up the category cliches. Our research was conclusive; consumers feel that brands within the category don’t understand them and the existing category advertising tropes compound the distrust they already feel towards casinos. We aren’t focused on the win, but all the feelings of entertainment that players get from online casinos: jeopardy, anticipation, connection – and even losing. That’s their lived experience with us, so it’s only right that we reflect that in our comms.

“We’re standing out from the category, as the entertainment brand, building on the Sky brand equity, in delivering great, quality entertainment. We’re using real world, everyday scenarios as metaphors for what Sky Vegas delivers to customers – entertainment in the small moments of the day that feels big and absorbing while you’re playing, but forgotten when they’re over.”

Sean Thompson, executive creative director and co-founder at Who Wot Why, said: “The truth is, most of us play little games in life – games with a touch of jeopardy that we can win or lose and that feel ridiculously exciting in the moment. Winning and losing is part of life, even in the smallest moments, and it’s fundamentally important and responsible to embrace this in the category.”

Who Wot Why has been working with Sky Vegas since 2020.