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Bingo’s just not that sexy

Posted in General, Marketing, Nikki Preston, Latest reporters' blogs July 6th, 2007 by Nikki Preston

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “bingo” is a room full of pensioners squashed into a town hall buying tokens with the hope of winning some Yardley soap or a meat tray.

So the marketers behind online bingo sites still have a long way to go if they want to make bingo attractive to the younger generation.

To their credit, they are looking at novel approaches to reinvigorate the betting game with the latest initiative by St Minver and Ann Summers to launch AnnSummersBingo.com. Ann Summers bingo aims to dress up the game by doing away with using simply numbers and instead giving them sexy, naughty names.

Likewise Foxy Bingo is endorsed by glamour model Jordan, (aka Katie Price) to promote its online offering and perhaps attract women in their twenties.

However, I doubt that the majority of women who would pop into Ann Summers for something fun to spice up their bedroom antics or pop into the store to pick up tacky merchandise for a rowdy hen party would want to be involved in such a solitary pursuit.

Why don’t bingo marketers stop with the cheap and tack and try a different approach to marketing? Is there any harm in adopting a more subtle and slightly more upmarket way of promoting bingo? Why not target females by showing an office worker who, in a move to save money, is planning a quiet night at home. But after finding nothing appealing on TV logs on to a bingo site only to win £500,000 – suffice to say…no more nights in for her!

Fair enough that the people that shop at Ann Summers may not always be the most ‘high end’ shoppers and enjoy “fun”, but surely even they can see through such a tacky offering and that there is no correlation between sex toys, provocative lingerie and Bingo. Perhaps the marketers are getting confused with strip poker…