Modern iGaming marketing is in crisis, with operators locked in a race to the bottom as they compete with their rivals over the size of the deposit match offered and not quality of the player experience provided.
While players follow the money, they don’t follow the brand. And this means churn is high while brand recall is low. But this is where we believe there’s a big opportunity, and one that we’ve been working hard to fill.
Operators must offer a big brand experience to players, and one of the ways they can do that is to stock their game lobbies with blockbuster titles – titles that are considered to be brands in their own right.
To do this, we’ve aligned Aviator – the world’s number one crash game with more than 77 million unique active players a month – with household name sports entertainment brands such as the UFC, WWE and legendary Italian football club, A.C. Milan.
Moving away from short-term performance hacks:
We’ve intentionally traded the ‘sugar hit’ of performance marketing for the long-term compounding interest of brand equity.
Having the Aviator logo appear inside the famous Octagon during UFC Fight Night or Pay Per View events, or carrying out marketing stunts with iconic fighters and footballers, creates instant, institutional trust that a generic social media ad never could.
With Aviator, we look at performance metrics more in terms of share of voice than cost per acquisition – and the numbers we see are extraordinary.
When we first joined forces with the UFC, Aviator had ten million unique active players a month – a couple of years later, and that number has increased more than 7x.
Brand storytelling and the high octane narrative:
But this has been down to finding the right partners to align with and when it comes to Aviator, it’s all about high risk/high reward and plenty of adrenaline. Here’s a little insight into why we joined forces with the UFC, WWE and A.C. Milan.
UFC and WWE:
The high stakes, high energy nature of combat sports is the perfect psychological match for a crash game like Aviator. With the UFC, we also have a brand ambassador fund that’s enabled us to launch campaigns with some of the biggest fighters.
This includes the likes of Michael Bisping, Valter Walker, Alexander Pantoja, Michael Page, Arman Tsarukyan, Diego Lopes, Alex Pereira and Merab Dvalishvili.
A.C. Milan:
This partnership is all about leveraging the prestige and history of a global football giant to transition Aviator into the lifestyle category in European and LatAm markets. It’s helped to position Aviator not only as a game, but as a “must play” social event for sports fans.
Of course, one of the biggest upsides is the transition of trust that takes place by partnering with such high-profile sports brands. The trust consumers have in each is transferred to Aviator, and in the gaming and betting world, trust is everything.
The role of creativity, culture and environment:
I touched on it before, but the brand ambassador fund we have in place with the UFC has been critical to the success of the partnership. It’s taken SPRIBE from being a game provider to a content creator, engaging fans on social media where they actually spend their time.
For example, when UFC champions Alex Pereira and Diego Lopes met Zlatan Ibrahimović at the San Siro, it wasn’t just a PR stunt, it was a collision of cultures. The resulting video didn’t just rack up 11 million views, it placed Aviator at the center of a global conversation where sport, celebrity and gaming meet.
One of the biggest advantages of these partnerships is the global reach we have gained from them – the UFC, WWE and A.C. Milan are international sports franchises with fans around the world, including in core markets like North America, LatAm, Africa and Europe.
In short, we have broken down the fourth wall of iGaming, taking Aviator out of the casino lobby and putting it in front of millions of sports fans worldwide.
Winning the attention economy:
In 2026, the winner isn’t the operator with the biggest bonuses, it’s the one who becomes a household name through cultural relevance. And that’s what we are trying to help them provide through the branding work we are doing with Aviator.
Because SPRIBE does the heavy lifting of brand building globally, the operator spends less on educating the player. They are stocking a “pre-sold” product.
By the time a player logs into the online casino or opens the sportsbook’s app, they already want to play Aviator because they have seen it during UFC Fight Night, or at the latest WWE show or during an A.C. Milan promo event.
Proof this is working? Just look at the 72 million unique players taking flight with Aviator every month and the more than 420,000 bets placed in the game every single minute.
