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Building Visibility Through Strategic Digital PR Coverage for Betway
How creative Digital PR earned Betway 81 placements across two markets, without a single story about gambling
81+
Pieces of coverage across two campaigns
DR94
Highest authority placement
UK&US
markets covered
The Brief
Navigating the media landscape as a gambling brand isn’t easy. Stringent editorial guidelines mean that most mainstream publishers won’t cover a betting or casino brand the way they would a consumer product or lifestyle company, which makes traditional outreach a short road to a dead end.
The Plan
To earn the kind of press coverage that builds organic visibility and brand authority, Betway needed a different way in. The challenge was consistent across markets: how do you generate high-quality, linked coverage at scale when the obvious routes are closed off?
The answer was to stop trying to make Betway the story, and start finding stories Betway could credibly own, identifying topics with genuine mass appeal and using original research to give journalists something they couldn’t produce themselves. Data-led campaigns give editors an independently verifiable news hook that doesn’t require them to endorse a gambling brand, and a well-structured dataset generates multiple regional and vertical angles from a single piece of work, scaling coverage without scaling cost.
Two example campaigns show what this looks like in practice, one built around Betway’s UK gaming audience, one designed to build brand presence across the United States.
The approach in action
How dirty are your consoles?
Betway’s core UK audience skews heavily towards gaming, which opened a door. We developed a campaign testing how much bacteria lives on gaming controllers, pitting PlayStation against Xbox in a hygiene study that had nothing to do with gambling and everything to do with an audience already paying attention. With headlines like “PlayStation vs Xbox: who is dirtiest?”, the story travelled fast across gaming press and beyond.
Resulting in 18 pieces of coverage, 17 follow links, from Gaming Bible (1.5m monthly readers), PSU (10m unique visitors/year), UK Tech News, VGR, Tech Shout
America's most popular roadside attractions
Road trips are deeply embedded in American culture. We built an original dataset ranking over 80 roadside attractions across the US by TripAdvisor reviews, Instagram posts, and Google search volume, crowning Gatorland in Orlando as the most popular in the country. A top 10 spread across seven states gave us a distinct local angle for press in Florida, California, Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Oregon, and North Carolina simultaneously.
Resulting in 63 pieces of coverage · DR 94 highest placementWith headlines such as ‘Playsation vs Xbox: Who is Dirtiest’ and ‘Study Finds Console Controllers Carry More Bacteria Than a Toilet Seat’, the dirty consoles campaign gained immediate traction with publishers. Betway were able to land links in Gaming Bible, Old School Gamer Magazine, Game Industry, VGR, Tech Shout, and PSU, among others.
the results
Across both campaigns, Betway earned coverage in publications they would have struggled to reach through conventional outreach. The dirty consoles campaign delivered 17 follow links from gaming press with large, highly relevant audiences, PSU alone draws close to 10 million unique visitors a year. The roadside attractions campaign built Betway’s US link profile at scale, with follow links from Mental Floss (DR 86), the Sacramento Bee (DR 84), San Luis Obispo Tribune (DR 74), CW33 (DR 71), and a syndication cluster of more than 20 Texas radio station websites. The highest-authority placements, Yahoo News and MSN, both sit above DR 92.
Why it worked
Neither campaign was about gambling. Both were about something the target audience genuinely cared about, gaming hygiene for a UK casino audience that skews towards gamers; road trip culture for an American audience with strong feelings about roadside America. Betway owned the research, and that was enough to earn the coverage.
The research format is the other constant. Ranked datasets give journalists a story they can publish without needing to editorially justify covering a gambling brand. They also generate multiple angles from a single piece of work, vertical by vertical, state by state, which is what allows one campaign to scale to 63 placements without 63 different pitches. That efficiency, combined with a deliberate focus on link quality, is what makes this approach work consistently in a sector where most other routes are closed.
Testimonial
“The ‘how dirty are your gaming consoles?’ content was our most prolific and successful casino SEO campaign to date. It helped us achieve 116 English speaking placements, with an additional 104 globally, over a variety of authoritative and high traffic sites across the UK, Canada and India. The campaign allowed us to achieve coverage on sites we have previously been rejected for, normally down to a lack of specialist content. The Gaming Bible ran the piece to their 1.5m monthly viewers, as did UK Tech News to their 1m monthly visitors. Across the pond, in Canada, our finest hit came on Playstation Universe (PSU), a site that has nearly 10 million unique viewers over 12 months. The campaign was Betway’s strongest to date, and the Kaizen team were a pleasure to work with, I couldn’t recommend the guys more and are looking forward to working with them again!”
– James Cole, Outreach Manager at Betway Group.
