Dave & Buster's, Gambling And A PR Fail (Or Win?)
Fair warning: This post is as much about communications and PR as it is about gambling (or games of skill, if you prefer). Yesterday’s news that Dave & Buster’s is rolling out a way to place friendly wagers was such a fascinating case study; it was arguably both a disaster and wildly successful at the same time.
Let’s start with the basics. Dave & Buster’s is an arcade/sports bar/restaurant chain across the country if you’re not familiar with the concept.
The whole news cycle started with a simple press release from a company called Lucra, which is a B2B provider in the gaming/gambling space. Here is the presser. And one of the key passages:
The new strategic partnership integrates Lucra’s proprietary gamification software into the Dave & Buster’s app, allowing loyalty members to digitally compete with each other, earn rewards, and unlock exclusive perks while competing with friends at Dave & Buster’s – bringing together the sports arena and the arcade for an unparalleled, gamified experience.
It’s not clear what exactly this is from the presser if we’re being honest. Ok, cool, somehow you can compete with people at Dave & Buster’s. Sounds interesting! Not something I would want to write about without more information, but intriguing.
We get a much better idea of what this is from the news about the partnership, which from everything I see, CNBC was the first (or one of the first) to report on it. It’s allowing casual gambling — or winning money from a game of skill — depending on how you want to frame it. CNBC took the news and immediately called it gambling:
Customers can soon make a friendly $5 wager on a Hot Shots basketball game, a bet on a Skee-Ball competition or on another arcade game. The betting function, expected to launch in the next few months, will work through the company’s app.
If you don’t know how the media works, here’s how the game is played and probably how it worked here. If you want a certain site to cover your news, you give it to them early with an “embargo,” which means you can’t release your story until a certain time. That seems to be what happened; the CNBC story dropped at 6 a.m. Eastern and the press release itself came about three hours later, from the timestamps I see.
This framing became problematic quickly in a few ways, which we’ll get to. But since I am far too negative most of the time, let’s start with the positive!
The good!
This story generated metric tons of earned (free) media for D&B and Lucra.
I hadn’t thought about Dave & Buster’s in a long time, and suddenly it was everywhere I looked. The conversation was all over Twitter/X, and the story was covered or aggregated by almost every major news organization in the United States. I had heard of Lucra (it pivoted from B2C operator to B2B provider) but it’s certainly not a name that almost anyone outside the industry would know.
There are not many press releases and pitches that generate that type of buzz. Designed or not, it was a wild success from a scale standpoint. Mission accomplished, right?
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The bad!
Well, that felt weird to say some nice things, so here are some less nice things. The PR effort was also a failure on a few fronts.
Control of the narrative
When you give someone early access to a story as a PR professional, you generally have (or should have) an idea of how the story will be framed. You won’t have control of the final product, of course. But the story shouldn’t be a surprise.
The press release is not about gambling; the story, as it was told all day on Tuesday, was entirely about gambling. It leads me to believe that the framing at CNBC and then echoed everywhere else wasn’t the intent. (For instance, D&B was staying out of it after the initial wave: “Dave and Buster’s has not yet disclosed if there will be a fee associated with the new service and did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.” I would imagine the folks at D&B wanted to avoid this having the appearance of being gambling adjacent when vetting the Lucra presser.
The people doing PR on this may be playing 4D chess, and they put out a pretty vague presser and then behind the scenes helped frame this as casual gambling.
Even if we think that’s true, they still lost control after that. Coverage in most places focused on the gambling terminology, with headlines like “Dave and Buster’s is getting into the gambling business,” which I don’t think is at all what D&B wanted.
The overwhelming reaction from people in and out of the gambling industry was along the lines of this: Dave & Buster’s is trying to facilitate gambling; while it’s a place for adults, kids frequent it as well. And why do we need gambling at an arcade? None of this is great!
All of the above leads to…
The law of unintended consequences
Crossing the line into calling something gambling comes with potential consequences.
Let’s start here: Games of skill for money exist in a lot of the country in a variety of ways and with few headaches. Stuff like FanDuel Faceoff and many more are in the App Store (and a correction from the original version of this newsletter, not usually in Google Play). Daily fantasy sports and fantasy pick’em exists around the country as a game of skill, whether you play against other people or against the house.
At the end of the day, a lot of these skill games — including playing against others for money at Dave & Buster’s — are somewhere on the spectrum of “gambling.” To steal a phrase I am stealing from someone in the industry, a lot of it is “lowercase 'g’ gambling.” Right now, it seems like policymakers and regulators care far less about the gambling as long as it’s peer-to-peer.
The secret, of course, is you don’t say it’s gambling, and you avoid the designation at all costs. This was the lesson learned from DraftKings and FanDuel from 2015-2017. Things were going poorly, and many called them gambling (including me); eventually, they turned back the narrative. (There should be a book about the DK/FD lobbying and PR efforts from that era, to be honest; it’s a fascinating case study.)
If the D&B coverage was out there with a narrative of real-money competitions of skill, nobody bats an eyelash (but it also probably doesn’t get nearly as much coverage). The gambling label was applied immediately, and putting the genie back in the bottle seems like an uphill climb. The optics matter almost as much as the logistics of what is going on.
As a result, we now have one of the more aggressive regulators taking issue with the concept in Ohio. Will it stop there, or will other states take a look at it? Who knows?
What I do know is what Dave & Buster’s didn’t want from all of this is gaming regulators poking their nose into their business.
Congratulations! Or Yikes!
It was (and still is) a fascinating PR effort and media cycle that has maybe as much good as bad. But I’m not sure if everyone is high-fiving or figuring out how Dave & Buster’s stays out of trouble. The stock PLAY 0.00%↑ so far wasn’t affected to any great degree.
If you’re doing PR, it’s often a lot more than just writing a release and doing some pitches. You have to consider how the news will play out in the real world. This story went viral — luckily or unluckily depending on how you want to look at it.
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