ESPN is making significant changes ahead of the 2025 college and NFL football seasons, and its new campaign from ESPN Bet Sportsbook is guiding fans through the tunnel, connecting games, gaming, and content.
Today, ESPN Bet is launching its “Sportsbook for Sports Fans” marketing push, with new ads showing fans navigating data and bets from the couch, changing up their fantasy football roster at the bar, and making parlay bets in a laundromat with picks from ESPN personalities—including ad narrator and ESPN First Take host and executive producer Stephen A. Smith.
Developed with help from creative agency Prophet, the spots showcase the sportsbook’s recently introduced FanCenter, which personalizes offerings based on wagering history, ESPN app favorites, and players on their fantasy rosters. The ads also highlight updating player stat cards and game logs, as well as featured bets from Smith and First Take, host Mike Greenberg and his Get Up show, ESPN Bet Live, and other programming.
In a nod to one of ESPN’s biggest recent moves, the campaigns show bet-tracking features that allow fans to follow their bets on screen while watching games on the recently launched ESPN streaming app. As ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro told The Athletic during the app’s launch earlier this week, “it is the first inning” of the company’s digital and streaming innovations and integrations.
ESPN collaborated with brands like Complex, Lyft, Samsung, and more on the app campaign.
“There are millions of people who use ESPN to get their stats, their stories about their favorite players, and the biggest fantasy sports product in the world,” said Gadi Rouache, head of design and creative at PENN Interactive. “What we’re creating is a seamless experience to connect sports fans to sports betting in a way that is intuitive and at your fingertips.”
In the first ad, “Tools,” ESPN Bet argues that it’s streamlining the game day experience by showing a fan doing fantasy football research in front of multiple monitors before eventually grabbing a smartphone and using the sportsbook to browse stats. In the same ad, another fan watching an ESPN studio show opens the sportsbook app to find bets related to what’s being discussed on screen.
The second, “Game Time,” features a fan using ESPN’s DTC service to browse live betting markets, place a bet on ESPN Bet, and track the wager from her couch. The scene then cuts to two fans at a bar pulling up FanCenter and doubling down on their fantasy football matchup with an additional bet.
“When we first floated the idea of the laundromat, we had some colleagues that looked at us quizzically, but we were saying that, for sports fans—and that is a very significant part of the adult population—sports are part of everything you do,” Rouache said. “How do we serve the fan? How do we serve that fandom experience? Because we believe that is our path to growth.”
It’s been seven years since the Supreme Court knocked down limitations on sports gambling, with 39 states and Washington, D.C., now offering some form of legalized sports wagering. Online sports gaming is now approved in 33 states and D.C., with a robust field of competitors that include multiple NFL gaming sponsors that aren’t ESPN Bet.
But with the NFL announcing its extended broadcast deal with ESPN and an equity stake in the broadcaster—and ESPN Bet placing a countdown clock on its sportsbook’s FanCenter ticking down to the NFL’s Sept. 4 kickoff game—ESPN Bet sees its new sportsbook features, campaign, and integration with the ESPN app as necessary tweaks to the playbook if it wants a distinct advantage over competitors during this time of year.
“Seamlessness is the key part of it, because, as with our lives, we want to reduce friction at every step,” Rouache said. We want to be able to think, ‘I have an opinion or prediction. I have a level of confidence, I’m going to convert that into a wager,’ and that there is no better place to celebrate opinions and predictions than ESPN—and that in the stats component, the editorial component, that is what drives that level of confidence.”
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