SBC News gets the inside view into bet365’s new marketing campaign and brand positioning as the 2026/27 Premier League season gets underway in an exclusive conversation with the firm’s Global Deputy Head of Brand Marketing, Ben Reeves.
The 2026/27 Premier League campaign got underway last Friday with defending champions Arsenal taking on newly-promoted Coventry City, as the North London side won 3-0. Watching from the sidelines were, as always, British bookmakers like bet365.
Premier League marketing is now well underway, and the Stoke-on-Trent headquartered bookmaker has followed competitors like Betway and Sky Bet in launching its campaign, “We Know Betting”, underpinned by an advert “Reasons”. The campaign follows “Never Ordinary”, its campaign for the 2025/26 season.
The Reasons campaign has gone live in the UK and Denmark, and will be taken live in Spain and Germany in the coming weeks. Produced by Newcastle marketing agency Drummond Central, the ad attempts to portray the life, products and experiences behind the bet365 brand.
Alex Sefton, bet365’s Global Chief Marketing Officer, described the campaign as giving the firm a “clear, confident platform to demonstrate rather than simply tell people why our expertise matters”.
To get a better understand of what this means, SBC News quizzed bet365’s Reeves…
SBC News: What were the main inspirations behind this new campaign?
Ben Reeves: The starting point was bet365 itself. The business has spent more than 25 years building a deep knowledge of betting, developing products and learning what matters to customers. When we spoke to customers and teams across the business, there was a very clear truth sitting underneath the brand: betting expertise is part of our DNA.
We Know Betting is about putting that into a simple, confident position. Importantly, we’re not trying to stand above customers and tell them we’re experts. We want people to experience that expertise through the products we build and the service we provide. Reasons is the first creative expression of that idea – showing the many tangible reasons why that accumulated knowledge ultimately creates a simpler, faster, more seamless and more rewarding experience for customers.
What would you say are bet365’s key strategic priorities moving into 2027, and how does this positioning and media campaign reflect that?
Our ambition remains to be the world’s leading betting and gaming brand, and fundamentally that means continuing to deliver an outstanding experience for our customers. Product innovation, customer experience, sustainable international growth and building an increasingly distinctive global brand are all important parts of that.
We Know Betting brings those things together because it isn’t simply an advertising line. It’s a long-term position that can run through Sports, Casino, our products, partnerships and communications.
Our expertise should be something customers can feel in every interaction with bet365 – whether that’s greater choice, value, a product that works intuitively or an experience that simply feels easier. Reasons begins that story, but the positioning is deliberately much bigger than one campaign.
What will bet365’s top priority markets be as part of this positioning? Are there any changes when it comes to your international strategy?
We’re an international business, so one of the reasons We Know Betting was so compelling to us was its ability to travel. The underlying truth – using expertise to create a better betting experience – isn’t specific to one country.
The initial Reasons campaign launches across the UK, Spain, Germany and Denmark, but the ambition for We Know Betting is much broader. We’ll continue to tailor execution to individual markets because customer behaviour, sporting culture and regulation differ significantly from country to country.
That’s always been part of our approach internationally. The consistency will come from the underlying brand position, rather than expecting every market to execute it in exactly the same way. The US is a good example of a market where we currently have a distinct positioning tailored to its audience and stage of development.
Betting marketing in the Premier League has entered a new era, with front-of-shirt sponsorship deals now voluntarily banned by the league’s clubs. For bet365, this was never going to be an issue, as the firm has never really counted front-of-shirt exposure in the top-flight as a core marketing asset.
And still, while their options have got more limited, bookmakers still value the Premier League as very important marketing real-estate, as seen by their marketing campaigns, many of which have got more creative as a result of the self-imposed front-of-shirt ban.
With Premier League viewership on Sky Sports up 25% last year, making it the most viewed season on record for the broadcaster, it’s easy to see why the Premier League’s value for marketers is as high as ever, and for bet365 this means going up against some stiff competition…
SBC News: How have you sought to make this campaign different from previous ones, particularly with the English football season now in swing?
Ben Reeves: The biggest difference is that we’re starting from a very clear brand truth rather than simply a campaign idea.
Reasons is deliberately designed to demonstrate expertise rather than claim it. You’ll see individual proof points across the campaign that show why our knowledge matters to customers. That gives us enormous creative flexibility because those Reasons can come from products, features, service, sporting knowledge or moments in the customer experience.
It also means the campaign can continue to evolve. Reasons is the first expression of We Know Betting, but future campaigns can look completely different creatively while still reinforcing the same underlying position.
That’s important because we’re building for the long term rather than just trying to win attention for the first few weeks of a football season.
Why did you choose the launch date as the opening day of the Premier League? Are you not concerned that this could have allowed competitors to get ahead?
The start of the football season is one of the biggest moments in the betting calendar, so it felt like the natural point to introduce the next chapter of the bet365 brand.
We’re also not particularly interested in being first for the sake of being first. Customers are exposed to a huge amount of marketing around the start of the season and our priority was to launch when we could make the strongest possible statement and sustain it from there.
We’ve spent more than 25 years in this category. We Know Betting is designed to be a long-term platform, not a campaign built around winning one particular weekend. We’d much rather launch something distinctive at the right moment than allow competitor activity to dictate our timetable.
Premier League marketing campaigning is well underway – Betway, Ladbrokes and Sky Bet to name a few. What makes bet365’s marketing stand out, in your view?
It’s an incredibly competitive category and there is a lot of strong marketing out there. Our focus isn’t on trying to imitate what somebody else is doing or simply shout louder.
What we have is a brand truth that very few businesses can replicate. bet365 has been at the forefront of digital betting for more than 25 years – from pioneering in-play betting to developing live streaming, Cash Out, Early Payout, Bet Builder and an enormous breadth of markets and products. That accumulated knowledge gives us a huge amount to work with creatively.
That’s why Reasons is potentially such a powerful campaign platform. We don’t have to tell customers we’re knowledgeable; we can continually give them reasons to experience it. In a category where advertising can sometimes look and sound similar, we think that’s a much more distinctive place for bet365 to occupy.
The Premier League’s front-of-shirt ban isn’t the only major change bookmakers have to contend with this year. The new tax regime introduced in April 2026, announced in the November 2025 budget, has been widely expected to bite into operator marketing budgets, with the likes of Entain, evoke and Flutter Entertainment all projecting that their marketing budgets would shrink 20% this year.
This hasn’t stopped the likes of Betway spending a reported £20m on its Manchester United sponsorship, but nonetheless marketing teams at operators like bet365 will have had to keep a much keener eye on their finances when crafting campaigns with their advertising agency partners this year.
Ensuring marketing meets the standards of the CAP Code, such as rules around the use of prominent personalities in advertising, is another big task for UK operators.
Many also anticipate the tax raises to have an impact on the market, with major players (Entain and Flutter etc) expecting to seize more market share as smaller competitors struggle to carry the new financial burden.
For a firm like bet365, one of the top five in the UK according to indices like Blask, a brand repositioning could be a logical way to achieve this goal…
SBC News: Regarding the new brand positioning, were there any major changes in the UK market that have prompted this change?
Ben Reeves: I wouldn’t describe it as a reaction to one particular change in the UK. This has been a longer-term evolution of the brand.
The betting category has become significantly more competitive and, across the industry, we’ve seen brands increasingly converge around similar product and promotional messages.
At the same time, customer expectations have evolved. Product remains incredibly important, but customers also want to understand what a brand stands for and why they should choose it.
Never Ordinary was an important step in moving us towards more emotional storytelling. We Know Betting takes that evolution further by giving us an enduring position that’s rooted in something genuinely distinctive to bet365: more than two decades of accumulated product, category and customer knowledge.
Have you had to adjust your UK marketing and media strategy at all this year due to the financial constraints of the new tax regime?
Like any major business operating in the UK, we continually assess our investment against the economic, regulatory and fiscal environment, and clearly the sector is operating against a changing backdrop.
What hasn’t changed is our belief in investing behind the brand and the customer experience. We’re very disciplined about where we invest and increasingly focused on ensuring our channels work together and that activity is accountable.
The launch of We Know Betting is a good example of that: rather than simply looking to be louder, we’re looking to be more distinctive and consistent, and to make every element of our marketing work harder.
Football marketing is an increasingly tricky discipline in the UK right now, with the CAP Code enforced quite rigorously. How have you factored this into planning?
Compliance isn’t something we add at the end of the creative process. It’s embedded in how we plan and develop marketing from the outset.
We’re very conscious of our responsibilities as one of the largest brands in the sector and of the standards expected when advertising around football. Our marketing, legal and compliance teams work closely together throughout campaign development to ensure activity is appropriate and meets the relevant requirements.
Regulation inevitably shapes some of the channels, talent and creative choices available to betting brands, but we don’t see responsible marketing as being at odds with effective marketing. If anything, it puts an even greater premium on having a distinctive brand idea.
We Know Betting gives us a much broader territory than relying on personalities, promotions or short-term acquisition messages – we can demonstrate expertise through our products, customer experience and knowledge in a way that’s both responsible and creatively compelling.
