Walk into Cheltenham Racecourse on a Festival afternoon, and you expect to be marketed to. Bookmaker boards line the track. Racecard ads compete for your attention. Sponsors get their logo on the race title and call it a day.
Paddy Power did not call it a day.
By the time the Paddy Power Stayers’ Hurdle went to post on Thursday afternoon, the brand had already won. Not the race. The day.
Merchandise as media
Before a single race was run, the crowd was doing Paddy Power’s (PP) marketing for them. Branded scarves around necks. Flat caps on heads. Green umbrellas dotting the betting ring as the rain came in. Every camera sweep of the stands picked up that distinctive green. Every punter wearing PP merchandise became a walking touchpoint.
I lost count of the number of times I was stopped and asked “Where did you get that scarf?”
That is the real measure of a successful merchandise strategy: not just that people wear it, but that people want it. When branded giveaways become something racegoers are actively seeking out, you have stopped advertising at people and started creating genuine demand.
This is not generosity. It is a distribution strategy dressed up as a giveaway. Getting physical branded items into the hands of tens of thousands of racegoers means your brand appears in every photo, every reel, every piece of user-generated content that leaves the racecourse that day. The media value of that is significant. The cost of a flat cap is not.
Owning the infrastructure
The merchandise was only part of it. Paddy Power went further by branding physical spaces on the racecourse itself, including dedicated bars and even the portaloos. It sounds like a novelty, but the logic is sound: if you can put your brand in every place a racegoer goes across an afternoon, you are not sponsoring an event, you are becoming part of the experience. At a festival where tens of thousands of people are on their feet all day, a branded bar is not a gimmick. It is a high-footfall environment with a captive audience and a reason to linger.
Product, not just presence
What separated Paddy Power’s Cheltenham activation from a standard sponsorship play was the deliberate push behind a specific product. The Eliminator, a free-to-play jackpot game with a £250,000 prize available every day of the festival, was everywhere. Trackside digital boards. Full-page racecard ads. Inside spreads. The same message, the same product, repeated across every format a racegoer would encounter across the afternoon.
The free-to-play mechanic is smart. It removes the barrier for non-customers, creates a reason to download the app, and gives existing customers something to engage with beyond their usual betting activity. Cheltenham becomes the acquisition moment. The product does the retention work afterwards.
The free bet as a conversion prompt
Alongside the Eliminator push, Paddy Power ran a second distinct offer in the racecard: a completely free bet on any race at Cheltenham. Same cast, same “POV:” framing, different commercial objective.
The free bet mechanic works across the entire customer spectrum. For someone who has never signed up, it is a low-friction reason to do so on the spot, with an immediate reward on a day when they are already primed to bet. For an existing customer who mainly bets in-shop or hands cash to an on-course bookmaker, it’s a prompt to open the app, perhaps for the first time in a while. For a lapsed user, it is a reason to come back.
The racecourse makes this particularly effective. Someone standing in the betting ring with their racecard, a phone in their pocket and a race 20 minutes away is about as receptive as any customer is going to get. The free bet ad catches them at precisely that moment.
Running both the Eliminator and the free bet in the same racecard means Paddy Power is covering every stage of the customer journey within a single print format, without either message feeling like it does not belong.
Social-native copy in a print medium
One detail worth pausing on: the racecard ads used “POV:” framing. A copywriting convention lifted directly from TikTok and Instagram, dropped into a traditional print format that most racegoers tuck into their coat pocket.
That is a deliberate creative decision. It signals that Paddy Power’s team are thinking about the on-course audience not as a separate demographic but as the same people who scroll their feeds on the way home. The creative brief clearly asked how the racecard ad connects to the content someone posts at 6pm. The answer was to speak in the same language across both.
A cast, not a spokesperson
The ambassador creative featured a carefully assembled ensemble rather than a single face. Danny Dyer and Gemma Collins bring mainstream celebrity recognition and entertainment value. Peter Crouch adds a sporting personality who crosses over well into popular culture. Ruby Walsh, one of the greatest Cheltenham jockeys of all time, provides genuine racing authority and credibility with the core audience. Harry Cobden, Paddy Power’s jockey ambassador, grounds the campaign in the present day and the actual sport.
No single person carries all of that weight. The cast approach means different people in the crowd find a different entry point into the brand: the racing purist, the casual punter, the pop culture fan. It is audience coverage by design.
The takeaway for iGaming marketers
Cheltenham gives every major bookmaker the same raw opportunity. A captive, engaged audience over four days, with guaranteed broadcast coverage and a social media cycle that runs around the clock.
Most sponsors take the logo placement and leave it there.
Paddy Power treated the racecourse as a fully integrated campaign environment, where merchandise, product, print, digital, physical infrastructure and ambassador activity all pointed in the same direction on the same day.
That is what event sponsorship looks like when it is done properly. And on Thursday, from the branded bar to the back of the racecard, it was hard to look anywhere else.
