By Irmi Nir, Creative and Brand Director | Built 10bet’s global brand G-CMO Europe community member

Before sports betting, I used to work in money transfers. Basically, transferring my advertising salary to betting sites.

So when betting became my job, I was already painfully aware of the industry’s greatest advantage: there’s no need to spark enthusiasm in a bettor. We gamblers arrive emotionally invested long before the homepage loads and the world’s most generic sites appear.

Diaper commercials need tenderness. Perfume ads need seduction. Tuna cans need shelf presence. But betting? Show football fans a ball, a net, and someone screaming at the sky like he just found his keys, and they’ll queue like it’s 1 a.m. outside a kebab shop.

That’s why so many sites (Paddy Power gets a pass) look like the love child of laziness and Shutterstock. Getting bettors to bet was never the hard part.

The real challenge is getting them to bet with you.

For years, the industry addressed this challenge like a drunk billionaire on a date: sponsor a Premier League club, sign a celebrity ambassador, buy another TV spot during the final, or inflate the welcome offer until it becomes a welfare program for bonus abusers.

That was the world I entered six years ago, and it hasn’t changed one bit: crowded, visually identical, and burning media budgets that could fund a moon landing.

So on my first morning in the office, I knew exactly what three things had to happen before anything else: coffee, another coffee, and then a hunt for a USP. I searched everywhere. Best odds, newest tech, widest range of markets. All were great selling points. None was unique. When all operators sit on the same platforms and use the same sportsbooks, there’s no real reason to choose one over the other.

So I took a gamble, and unlike my sports bets, a good one: I went all in on personality.

Instead of fighting for bettors’ wallets, with better odds or bigger bonuses, I fought for their affection.

Newsletters became entertainment. Banners stopped looking like stock assets. Inner pages that hadn’t seen sunlight since 2003 got microcopy with jokes, character, and energy, and promotions became creative ideas.

A £5 free bet if an Irish player with “Mc” in his name scored.
A social cooking show called Foodball, where a chef gave matchday snack recipes.
A £10K raffle drawn on 10/10 at 10:10:10.
And during a World Cup where everyone else showed men kicking balls, we built a campaign around a 96-year-old fan who had watched every tournament since Uruguay 1930 and swore our World Cup festival was the best he’d ever seen.

I could go on like this for years. And I did.

Cheaper than buying fame? Yes. Easier? Not even close. But when everyone is shouting the same things, difference itself becomes media. We gave bettors what most operators forgot to offer: a brand they could actually like. Not just use or milk for a bonus. Like.

Branded search started climbing, we were shortlisted for Sportsbook of the Year, and in a category where most operators blurred together, 10bet started to stand apart. Later, we expanded the brand into Sweden, Mexico, and South Africa, which demanded some tuning to our UK challenger strategy, but that’s for another article.

Sports betting does not have a motivation problem. It has a sameness problem, and that can’t be solved by a bigger logo or a louder offer. It’s solved by the nerve to be distinctive.

Sports betting is just like sport: if all you do is match the other guy, the best you can hope for is a draw.