Darragh McGee

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I guess the book adopts a kind of two decade frame for that.

And what I argue is that since the turn of the century, gambling firms have changed quite radically.

What we understand by the term gambling has changed quite radically.

And what I mean by that is this is an industry no longer kind of tethered to the race course or a day at the races.

This is an industry revolutionized by the advent of the internet, then the smartphone, the rise of social media, data science, all in essence that the big tech giants of the Silicon Valley kind of unleashed.

And so I guess I'm talking about this new age engineering of what gambling is, and that gave rise to a new wave of online gambling brands.

And they had kind of a challenge a couple of decades ago, and that was to reduce the age of their punters.

They understood that to stay profitable, they needed to move beyond horse racing.

And all that meant reframing gambling as something quite new for a new generation.

And of course, they set their sights on football more than any other sport.

And through football, the hijacking that I lay out is becoming genius marketers is, I guess, the first thing to say.

They spent billions annually on marketing and did it incredibly well.

An argument I set out in the book is that

Gambling firms are arguably at the frontier of what marketing becomes since the early noughties.

They sponsored football clubs.

They partnered with leagues.

They recruited athletes and celebrities to legitimate kind of the industry and particular products.

They designed an entire new range or paradigm of products like in-plate betting, which I'm sure we'll talk about.