Planning and Buying: Budgets, Markets, Calendars and Agencies

From a number to a plan

Every lesson in this course feeds one document: the media plan. It turns a budget into channels, markets, months and accountable owners, and it has to survive three audiences who read it differently. Finance reads it as a cost line and a payback promise. Compliance reads it as a list of placements and audiences that could go wrong. The board reads it, eventually, as a ratio in the annual report. This lesson works through how a gambling media plan is built: setting the budget, adapting it to the maturity of the market, planning around the sports calendar, choosing who buys, and understanding how the result will appear in the company's published numbers.

Setting the budget

There are two ways to arrive at a marketing budget, and serious operators use both and reconcile them.

Top down, from a ratio. The business decides that marketing should be a given share of revenue, informed by its own history and by what comparable listed operators report. Lesson one showed the range: in 2025, large groups' marketing lines sat between roughly 12% and 23% of revenue depending on definition and market maturity. A ratio is a sensible guardrail and a poor plan, because it says nothing about whether the money will earn its return.

Bottom up, from payback. The business decides how many new depositors (in the trade, FTDs) it wants, what each is worth, and what it can afford to pay for them, using the incremental acquisition cost and payback logic from lesson six. Listed operators expose the logic when they report it: Flutter, for example, has described its US customer acquisition as operating inside a 24-month payback threshold.

A worked reconciliation

The figures are hypothetical. An operator in a mature, regulated market expects net gaming revenue of £200m next year. Its board guidance is a marketing ratio of about 15%, which would mean £30m.

The bottom-up build looks like this:

The two methods land close together, which is the point of doing both. Where they diverge, the bottom-up build is the one to interrogate, because each line has a stated assumption that can be challenged. If finance asks what happens at £24m, the answer is not a pro-rata cut: it is a decision about which line to cut, and the incrementality evidence from lesson six says which line will cost least in lost customers. Cutting the testing reserve first is the usual mistake, because it is the line that tells you what the others are worth.

Launch markets and mature markets

The single biggest determinant of a gambling media plan is the maturity of the market, and in particular whether the operator is entering it or defending a position in it.

Two features of the launch column are specific to gambling. The first is the gating work. Platform certification is applied for market by market, and on Google per country under the August 2026 revision of the certification standards, so a launch plan that schedules paid search from day one without allowing for certification is not a plan. The second is that launch spend is visible to regulators. In the United States, both DraftKings and Flutter cited new state launches as drivers of higher marketing spend in the first half of 2026, and in France the regulator reviews licensed operators' promotional strategies for the year ahead and, for 2026, asked them to stay within the budgets they had declared.

The launch column also explains why marketing ratios in growth markets look alarming and are not necessarily irrational. An operator acquiring customers who pay back over two years will report heavy losses in the year it acquires them. The question for anyone reading the plan is whether the payback assumption has been tested on incremental customers or merely asserted on attributed ones.

The calendar

Sports betting demand follows the fixture list, and media prices follow demand. A plan built evenly across twelve months will overpay in the weeks that matter and underspend in the weeks that matter most.

The French regulator's review of operators' 2026 plans is the clearest published picture of how concentrated tournament spending is: the two World Cup months of June and July accounted for 21% of planned annual promotional spend, and total planned spend rose 25% on 2025, which the operators attributed largely to the tournament. The regulator then asked operators not to exceed the budgets they had announced, and noted that the introduction of hydration breaks during World Cup matches would create about two additional minutes of advertising per match, inventory which one major broadcaster decided not to sell to gambling advertisers.

Three planning principles follow.

Plan the big events as separate campaigns with their own budgets. A World Cup, a European Championship, the start of the domestic football season, the major racing festivals and the US football playoffs each have their own audience, inventory and price curve. Folding them into an annual run rate hides the trade-offs.

Buy early where inventory is scarce and late where it is not. Broadcast and sponsorship inventory around a major tournament is sold months ahead. Digital inventory can be bought in the week, but its price rises with competition.

Expect the event to change the rules. Tournaments attract regulatory attention, new inventory (such as the hydration breaks) is often excluded from gambling by media owners, and platforms and broadcasters tighten their own codes ahead of a home tournament. Building a compliance review into each event campaign, rather than assuming the year's sign-off covers it, is cheap insurance.

The calendar also affects measurement. A geo test that runs across a tournament will measure the tournament, and a mix model without fixture data will credit the advertising with what the football did.

Agencies, in-house teams and hybrids

Operators buy media in three ways: through an external media agency, through an in-house team buying directly from platforms and media owners, or through a hybrid in which the operator runs some channels itself and the agency runs others. The wider advertising market has moved strongly towards hybrids. The Association of National Advertisers in the United States reported in 2023 that 82% of its members had an in-house agency, compared with 78% in 2018, while 92% of those respondents also worked with at least one external agency, and 54% of in-house agencies handled some media planning or buying.

The usual division of labour in gambling is that an operator brings in-house the channels that need daily optimisation, deep data access and fast compliance decisions (paid search, paid social, app campaigns and programmatic retargeting), and uses an agency for broadcast, out-of-home, sponsorship valuation and international expansion, where buying scale and media owner relationships matter.

Gambling adds four considerations to the usual agency choice.

The agency contract is where most of these considerations are settled, and four clauses deserve more attention than they usually get. Data ownership: platform accounts, pixels, audiences and conversion data should sit in accounts the operator owns, with the agency given access, never the reverse. Transparency: the operator should be able to see what was paid to each media owner and platform, not only the agency's invoice. Testing: the agency should be obliged to run, and share the raw results of, the incrementality tests in the plan, including tests that may show its own channels underperforming. Compliance: placement reports, exclusion-list refresh logs and creative approvals should be delivered on a fixed schedule, so that the operator can evidence its controls without asking.

Whichever model is chosen, the operator must own three things: the first-party conversion data, the test design and results, and the compliance sign-off. An agency can run all of these. If the operator cannot see them without the agency, it does not control its own marketing.

How ad spend appears in company results

Most practitioners will see their work summarised in a single line of an annual report, and it is worth knowing how that line is built.

The expense line. US-listed operators report "sales and marketing" as an operating expense. It typically includes advertising, affiliate commission, sponsorship, marketing staff and, in some groups, amortisation of acquired brands. DraftKings and Flutter both disclose advertising costs separately in their accounting notes: DraftKings reported $1,124.8m of advertising costs in 2025, within total sales and marketing of $1,379.9m, and Flutter reported $2,053m of advertising costs in 2025. UK and European groups often report "marketing costs" or "marketing expenses" and use their own definitions.

The ratio. Many operators report marketing as a percentage of revenue or of net gaming revenue, by segment, because investors use it to judge operating leverage. evoke reports a "marketing ratio" of 19.6% across its online divisions for 2025, and Super Group reported that its marketing expenditure fell to 23.3% of gaming revenue as the business "continued to identify more effective marketing channels with higher returns on spend".

Contribution. Several groups report a profit measure after marketing, such as Entain's "contribution", defined in its 2025 annual report as gross profit less marketing costs. Contribution is the closest public proxy to the payback logic in lesson six; the glossary entry on contribution margin explains the general measure.

What is not in the line. Bonus and promotional costs are often deducted from revenue rather than counted as marketing, so a group that shifts acquisition from advertising to offers can reduce its reported marketing ratio without reducing the cost of acquiring a customer. Spain's regulatory data, which counts promotions as marketing, shows how large that element can be. When comparing operators, check where bonuses sit.

The Reading iGaming Financial Results course covers these disclosures in depth, and the guide to player acquisition in iGaming sets out the channels in overview. For a media team, the practical point is that the plan should be built so that the numbers it produces can be reconciled to the published line, and so that a change in the published ratio can be explained by decisions in the plan rather than discovered afterwards.

A one-page plan

A plan that is useful to all three audiences fits on one page per market. A hypothetical example for a mature market:

Every element on that page traces back to a lesson in this course: market context, platform access, broadcast and sponsorship, digital buying with suppression, creative inside the rules, and measurement. A plan that cannot fill one of the rows is telling you where the next piece of work is.