Not a lottery: A PR win for Allwyn
If you ever find yourself wondering whether good PR can truly make a difference, news today should settle the matter.
The fight to win the franchise to run the National Lottery has been bitterly fought for months.
Today, the Gambling Commission handed it to Allwyn, a subsidiary of Europe lotto giant Sazka, owned by a lottery tycoon with some oil interests called Karel Komarek.
That’s a serious blow to incumbents Camelot, which has run the UK national lottery for 28 years.
There’s plainly a chance of a judicial review – Camelot did that once before to get a bid by Richard Branson overturned – so this story might not quite be over.
The wording of the release from the Gambling Commission almost seems to anticipate this, noting that “the selection of Allwyn as preferred applicant follows a fair, open and robust competition”.
There were four applications at the final stage, and one thing each bid had in common was this: strong hints of commercial deals with newspapers in the event of a victory.
That promised money may never have arrived – in three cases out of four, we will never know.
Having followed this relatively closely, the difference was made by PR.
The losing sides didn’t have bad PR – but Allwyn’s was excellent.
The case they made left more than a few of us thinking they just had to win; that it would be ridiculous if they did not.
The Gambling Commission plainly thought so too.
A nice travel one here from Merchant Machine, just as we all think about holidays.
The most expensive places to go are Norway, Iceland and Israel. There are country comparisons for the cost of bread, milk and beer.
A lager in Norway is nearly £8. That’s even worse than London.
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