After the hiccups and concerns that came with Barstool Sportsbook and The Barstool College Football Show, Penn and ESPN aren’t taking any chances when it comes to the launch of ESPN Bet and college sports.
Like The Barstool College Football Show, ESPN College GameDay travels around to college campuses throughout the season and broadcasts the show.
College GameDay crew will not discuss ESPN Bet on air
With that in mind, ESPN and Penn will be limiting the kinds of integrations and promotion done around ESPN Bet and the program.
Penn Entertainment’s Chief Strategy Officer Chris Rogers spoke with the Massachusetts Gaming Commission on Tuesday about some of the precautions and rules that will be put in place around College GameDay and other ESPN programming on college campuses.
ESPN College GameDay announcers will not be discussing or promoting ESPN Bet as part of the broadcast. That includes Pat McAfee, who is part of the College GameDay team and former spokesperson for FanDuel.
Additionally, ESPN Bet will not do any on-site activations at college events. There will be no ESPN Bet signage either.
While the audience at College GameDay will not be seeing any ESPN Bet material, the network will potentially film promotions off campus that are integrated into the broadcast. As Rogers pointed out the MGC, the television audience for these games meets the threshold of at least 75% of the viewers being over the age of 21 required by the state.
ESPN will also continue to feature commercials from other sportsbooks. Penn’s exclusivity only extends to programming integrations.
The SBC Americas team spoke about the plans for ESPN Bet on a recent episode of iGaming Daily:
ESPN News employees will not interact with Penn at all
In terms of general integrity measures, ESPN staffers will not be explicitly prohibited from betting on sports but everyone in the ESPN News department will be explicitly prohibited from communicating with Penn staff.
The MGC has requested Penn deliver the final document of how Penn and ESPN will interrelate. Additionally, the commissioners asked questions and expressed some concerns about on-air personalities promoting the app. The app is slated to switch from Barstool
There is a regulation in Massachusetts that expressly prohibits operators, affiliates, and marketers from actively telling bettors what to bet. To date, the MGC has let a wide range of content that arguably runs afoul of that regulation. As Interim MGC Executive Director Todd Grossman noted, the approach to date has been that the commission has drawn a line between advice or picks versus actively soliciting someone to place a specific bet.
“There’s a difference between potentially offering an opinion as to a game and a spread and what someone like Pat McAfee thinks about it, versus saying, ‘Hey, you should go out and place this wager,'” Grossman explained.
Nonetheless, the commissioners did question whether or not this needed to be approached differently for ESPN and ESPN Bet because the names are one in the same. And, unlike FanDuel TV or DraftKings Network, the operator is licensing the pre-established brand, not launching a network on the strength of their own brand.
Penn and ESPN to provide internal marketing rules to MGC
Commissioner Eileen O’Brien was particularly concerned about brand interplay and wanted to potentially stipulate approval of the rebrand contingent on the delivery of the documentation of how ESPN and Penn will interrelate and corporate policy on ESPN on-air talent. That documentation does not need to come before the planned Nov. 14 launch but should arrive sometime in December.
Penn volunteered to offer up this documentation but did question if they were being treated equitably. Rogers noted that DraftKings has integrations on ESPN Monday Night Football that were part of the show last night. He also noted basically every operator utilizes media personalities to offer customized bets and plug products.
I’m struggling to figure out why, just because there’s a branding similarity that you would not be requiring other operators meet similar policies,” Rogers told the commissioners.
