The Cheltenham Festival is many things. Four days of elite jump racing. A cultural institution.
A pilgrimage for tens of thousands of racing fans from across Britain and Ireland. And, for anyone working in iGaming marketing, it is the closest thing the industry has to a live laboratory.
I was on the ground at Prestbury Park on Thursday for what is aptly known as St. Patrick’s Thursday (Day Three). What struck me was not the gap in spend between the major brands: that is a given. Paddy Power, William Hill and Tote are operating on very different marketing budgets, and nobody expects otherwise.
What was interesting was how each brand used what they had. Same event, same audience, same window. Three very different approaches to making the most of it.
Paddy Power: Total environmental ownership
Paddy Power sponsored the Stayers’ Hurdle on Thursday afternoon, and they treated that naming rights deal as a starting point rather than a finish line.
Before the first race was run, the crowd was already doing their marketing for them. Paddy Power green. Scarves, flat caps, umbrellas: all distributed freely, all worn without hesitation by tens of thousands of racegoers who had no idea they were walking billboards. The fact that people were actively seeking the merchandise out rather than discarding it tells you everything about how well it was executed.
The physical presence went further than merchandise. Paddy Power branded bars and even portaloos across the racecourse ensured their name appeared in every corner of the venue. A racegoer could not move through Cheltenham on Thursday without encountering the brand in some form at multiple touchpoints.
In the racecard, two distinct products ran side by side. The Eliminator, a free-to-play jackpot game offering £250,000 every day of the festival, was pushed hard across trackside digital boards, full-page ads and inside spreads.
Alongside it, a free bet offer used the same creative cast and the same “POV:” copy framing, but targeted a different objective: driving app opens across every stage of the customer journey, from first-time sign-ups to lapsed users standing in the betting ring with a race 20 minutes away.
That “POV:” convention, borrowed directly from social media and dropped into a traditional print format, was a deliberate signal. Paddy Power’s creative team are clearly thinking about how the on-course audience connects to an online content cycle. The racecard ad and the post you put on your story at 6pm are part of the same campaign.
Look at the cast, and you can see the brief. Danny Dyer and Gemma Collins are not there because they know their way around a racecard. They are there because millions of people who have never studied a form guide know exactly who they are.
Peter Crouch sits somewhere in between: a sporting figure with genuine mainstream crossover. Ruby Walsh and Harry Cobden are the anchors for anyone who needs convincing that Paddy Power belong at Cheltenham. It is a deliberately broad church, and that is the point.
William Hill: Smart product thinking with a different audience in mind
William Hill’s presence at the Festival was broader than it first appeared. They held naming rights for the County Hurdle on Gold Cup Day, the biggest day of the festival, and used the week to push Lucky Stable, their free-to-play game offering £5,000, across the racecard and their on-course betting shop.
What makes Lucky Stable worth examining more closely is the product mechanic itself. Unlike Paddy Power’s Eliminator, where players select their own horses, Lucky Stable randomly draws horses for you. That is not a limitation: it is a deliberate design choice. By removing the need to study form or understand race dynamics, Engage Games have built William Hill a product that genuinely lowers the barrier to entry for casual or new-to-racing audiences.
Someone attending Cheltenham for the atmosphere rather than the form book can participate on equal terms with someone who has been studying the card all week.
That puts Lucky Stable in a different category to most free-to-play racing games. It is less about rewarding knowledge and more about bringing people into the sport through a fun, accessible format.
The racecard placement and betting shop poster reached a contained audience, but the product itself has a broader strategic purpose: building familiarity with horse racing among people who might otherwise find it impenetrable.
Tote: Product clarity over noise
Tote used the racecard to do something slightly different from either of their competitors. Rather than a free-to-play acquisition product, their ads focused on making a product case: a £1 million estimated Placepot pool available every day of the festival, and the Tote Guarantee, which promises to pay whichever is better between the Tote dividend and starting price on win bets.
The creative featured Danny Mullins, a decorated jockey and a central figure in the Willie Mullins operation that dominates modern jump racing. Using Mullins keeps the campaign firmly rooted in the racing audience rather than reaching for mainstream celebrity crossover, and given the scale of die-hard racing punters at Cheltenham, it is a particularly well-targeted choice of ambassador.
The red brand identity was bold and consistent across both ads. The messaging was direct and functional: here is why betting with Tote makes financial sense.
It is a mature brand approach. Less about entertainment and experience, more about product differentiation at a moment when racegoers are actively making decisions about where to place their money.
What the 2026 festival told us
Cheltenham gives every major operator the same raw opportunity. The differences in how they used it this year reveal a lot about where each brand currently sits strategically.
Paddy Power treated the racecourse as a fully integrated campaign environment, investing across merchandise, physical infrastructure, digital, print and ambassador activity to create something that felt less like a sponsorship and more like a takeover. The commercial objectives were layered: awareness, product adoption, app engagement, acquisition, and UGC generation, all running simultaneously.
William Hill focused their energy on a specific product in specific environments, sensibly targeted but limited in reach and resonance beyond those touchpoints.
Tote made a clear product argument to a receptive audience, with creative that respected the intelligence of the racing fan rather than chasing broader entertainment appeal.
The lesson for iGaming marketers is not that one approach is right and the others are wrong. It is that Cheltenham rewards brands who have a clear, coherent strategy and the investment to execute it consistently across every surface available to them.
A racecard ad in isolation is just an ad. A racecard ad that connects to a trackside board, a branded bar, a celebrity campaign and a scarf around someone’s neck is something else entirely.
