Company

Betfair became official betting sponsor of the CONMEBOL Libertadores and Sudamericana in 2019, putting its brand front and centre across two of South American football’s biggest club competitions. For a sponsor, that kind of visibility is easy to buy and hard to make feel earned. A logo on a hoarding gets seen, but it doesn’t build the kind of relationship with fans that keeps a brand front of mind once the final whistle goes.

Sponsorship is a familiar playbook for Betfair. Football clubs, cricket and horse racing have all carried its branding over the years, from Premier League shirt deals to England’s Test grounds to some of jump racing’s biggest meetings. Betfair knows how to secure the exposure that comes with a sponsorship. What it wanted from Libertadores was something that deal type doesn’t automatically give you, a real connection with the fans following the competition, not just a logo they’d grown used to seeing around it.

Challenge

Betfair’s international sponsorship team wanted more than exposure from the Libertadores partnership, they wanted fans to associate the brand with the excitement of the competition itself, not just with betting odds sitting alongside it. That meant finding a way to sit inside the fan experience rather than next to it, across every match from the quarter-finals onwards, and across three different Betfair markets.

The usual sponsor playbook, logos in broadcast and around the pitch, doesn’t do much to build a longer-term emotional connection. Fans scroll past branded ads. What they engage with is content about their team, their players, their moment. Betfair needed a way to be part of that content, not a separate thing bolted onto it.

Solution

Betfair worked with Amondo to build a Gallery covering every Libertadores match from the quarter-finals onwards, embedded across three of Betfair’s own websites.

A co-branded wall feels earned, not slapped on

Rather than running Betfair branding alongside the content, the Gallery brought team, player and fan content together with Betfair’s own material in one place. That distinction matters. A logo next to a highlight reel is an ad. A branded wall genuinely built from what fans are already posting and talking about is something they engage with on its own terms, and Betfair’s presence travels with it. That’s a much better route to the longer-term emotional connection a sponsor is actually after, rather than a brand relying on repetition alone to be remembered.

Making influencer content work harder

Betfair also had its own influencer content and promotional videos to activate. Instead of letting that content live and die on a single post, it was folded into the same Gallery as the team and fan content, giving it a second life across the length of the tournament rather than a single moment in a feed. That meant influencer budget kept earning attention long after the original post had been and gone.

CTA tiles that feel like the next step, not an interruption

Bespoke call-to-action tiles sat inside the Gallery, linking through to Betfair’s registration pages. Because they appeared inside content fans were already trusting and engaging with, rather than as a separate ad unit, they read as the natural next step rather than a hard sell, not an ad breaking into the moment.

Data most sponsorships never give you

Most sponsorship activations end at reach and impressions, a sense of how many people saw the branding, with little visibility into what happened next. Because Amondo measures how people actually engage with the content itself, scrolling, dwelling, clicking through, Betfair got a layer of first-party behavioural data that a standard partnership placement wouldn’t produce. That gave the team something to learn from mid-campaign, not just report on afterwards, and a clearer view of what to carry into how future sponsorship investment gets planned and spent.

Results

• Click-through rate 4x target on the registration CTA tiles, the clearest sign that fans were following content through to the next step rather than scrolling past it

• 55k Gallery views across the three Betfair websites

• 1m16s average session length, showing people were exploring the content rather than passing straight through

The campaign showed that for a sponsor without its own matches to produce content around, the strongest route to registrations isn’t more branding; it’s becoming part of the story fans are already telling, backed by data most partnership activations never surface.