End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- UK gambling coverage is getting tighter.
- The US is a state-by-state tapestry, not one national framework.
- For ideation, start with addressing user behavior, not brand.
- Plot ideas on a relevance vs. impact matrix.
- Educate clients on link cadence for industries with tough link goals.
A while back, I shared a gambling survey from VIP Grinders in one of my content roundup videos because it landed some great headlines even though it was in a notoriously difficult industry.
I soon discovered that it was the work of Lee Mitchell, Senior Digital PR Manager at Reboot.
So, naturally, I had to get him on the podcast to talk all about getting links and coverage in the igaming and gambling industry.
We got into the differences between UK and US gambling restrictions, why brand mentions matter more than ever for gambling brands in the age of AI, Lee’s “bridge,” SHARK, and matrix approaches to ideation, and how he convinced VIP Grinders that a headline about people hiding gambling losses was a good thing for their brand.
Let’s get into it.
Below is a slightly edited transcript:
What’s the difference between gambling and iGaming?
Lee Mitchell: Definitely.
Gambling is the broad church, as I see it — the all-encompassing category: betting, casinos, bingo, lottery, the lot.
iGaming drills into more of a niche. It’s the online end of that church, so to speak.
You’ve got the casino games, the slots, the poker, and sportsbook, which is obviously huge at the moment as well.
There’s a delineation.
All iGaming can be considered gambling, but not all gambling is iGaming. That’s probably the best way to summarize it.
What restrictions does the UK have on gambling content and coverage?
Lee Mitchell: For sure. I work a lot in both markets.
With the UK, there are a couple of things at play, and it’s a lot tighter at the moment, particularly around 2026.
We’ve got the ASA — the Advertising Standards Authority — and the Gambling Commission both impacting this industry. They’re actively monitoring gambling content across all marketing, including socials. And as we know as digital PRs, if you’ve got a great campaign, it sometimes ends up on socials. So it impacts anything that’s going to be seen by a consumer.
By virtue of that, journalists at most of these high-DR, high-authority publications tend to second-guess.
Even if you’ve got a great survey or a great piece of data, it’s, “Should I be linking to this from June 2026?” Because they could essentially be hit by the guidelines. It doesn’t really matter how legit the story is.
So with the UK specifically, it’s about making those campaigns really tailored and drilled down — essentially what I did with VIP Grinders.
Gambling responsibility just isn’t touched on nearly enough.
That’s partly due to fear from brands, which in some circumstances is legitimate on their part.
But I think a lot more bravery should be shown by these brands, using digital PR as a great medium to position themselves as responsible-gambling-first.
I think 47% of the UK have gambled in the last month — that was the latest statistic I saw recently. We’re not talking about a niche part of the audience. As you said, you walk into a pub and you see a slot machine. In some way or form, gambling is part of UK culture.
There are correct ways to gamble. There’s irresponsible gambling, and then there’s responsible gambling. For the UK, it’s about owning that from the digital PR side.
Does the US have similar restrictions on linking and coverage?
Lee Mitchell: The US is a lot more liberal with linking, which makes it great fun to work in.
But compared to the UK, the US is much more of a tapestry. It’s state by state.
If you’re working on a campaign targeted at New Jersey, for example, you’re onto a winner from day one.
New Jersey is usually kind of a layup for nailing down good coverage with a good campaign.
On the flip side, you’ve got Utah — one that sticks in my head — which has essentially zero tolerance for gambling and general gambling promotion.
That’s a state that will invariably never provide a link or piece of coverage.
That really hits home the importance of doing your research first.
You’ll get a lot of people spraying and praying: “I’ve got a great regional breakdown in this great campaign.” With the VIP Grinders campaign, for example, every state was broken down.
But there’s no point drilling down and targeting Utah, because they won’t do it based on their own regulations.
You’d be way more familiar than I am with the US legal system, but it’s not one national framework.
Vince Nero: We’re definitely seeing it. I base a lot of it off the ads I hear for DraftKings and FanDuel, these sports betting apps. I think they’re now available in all fifty states — although maybe not Utah. They have to do these big disclaimers after every podcast mention or ad, listing the states they’re available in.
And then there’s the “if you have trouble with gambling, you can call 1-800-GAMBLER” or something like that. So there are definitely strict restrictions in the US too.
Do those restrictions apply to brand mentions, or just links?
Lee Mitchell: I don’t think so. The linking is the main point.
It usually comes from an internal remit at the publications — it’s more about what they’re comfortable with and their interpretation of the current restrictions.
For the UK, it’s, “Should I err on the side of caution? Does this campaign have a bit too strong an appeal to under-18s, for example?”
If it does, I’d say in that circumstance they probably won’t even give you a brand mention. They’ll stick to the tried-and-tested reply: “We don’t work with gambling or iGaming brands.”
It does go journalist to journalist, but there are a lot of publication-wide remits that circulate. And with the UK, there are laws happening now.
I think the latest big push was June 2026, with the Advertising Standards Authority having more of a focus on, “Does this have too much broad appeal to under-18s?”
There’s an argument that with a lot of haphazard campaigns you think are great, if they can argue it has too much appeal, they probably aren’t going to run it.
So you have to target better.
I look at the bright side: it makes you a better PR.
You’ve got to be aware of these things, because so many iGaming and gambling businesses are now using digital PR.
You set yourself apart from the rest when you do the extra bit of research and make your targeting a bit more bespoke.
And that goes down to campaign ideation — not just “my pitch email needs to be targeted to this journalist.”
You’ve got to take this into consideration from day dot. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.
Has the shift toward AI and brand mentions made gambling digital PR easier?
Lee Mitchell: It’s been a long, almost decade for me in digital PR trying to convince clients that brand mentions are valuable — which I believe they are.
And now we’ve actually entered a stage where they actually are.
We’re rolling out a new service line, AI PR, and we actually work with a very large gambling client at the moment who is going through AI PR.
The new service line includes brand mentions in the contract.
And it goes beyond the brand mention. It goes into context wrapping, which is the most key factor — how the brand is being phrased.
That’s in the technical sense of exactly what they’re offering, but also in the broader, more holistic sense of positive versus negative sentiment.
I think that got lost along the way with digital PR and chasing links — that classic race to the bottom that does happen sometimes with some agencies and some campaigns.
Even though we’re going forward with AI PR, we’re bringing it back to how that framing is.
It’s a breath of fresh air. Even more clients appear to be taking the AI PR offering.
How do you ideate campaigns that get around restrictions without hurting brand sentiment?
Lee Mitchell: It’s the wild, wild west of ideation, as I like to tell the team. We have a number of ways of approaching it.
To start with the VIP Grinders idea specifically — the Gambling Trend Survey 2026.
When I was ideating that piece, I pulled myself back and started from behavior first.
I did something I wouldn’t normally do: I went behavior before brand.
I think that should help in most iGaming ideation.
What I mean is, when you link human behavior to a brand like gambling, there are multiple facets you can unlock.
One of the key ones for me was not going down the route of pitching the best roulette tables of 2025 or 2026 — promotional stuff.
You’ve got to think a bit more critically about what people care about, what responsible gambling is, and what the messaging behind it is.
With the survey, one thing I thought about was that gambling is money.
It’s personal finance. It’s relationships in general.
That’s something I get the team to do for every ideation, and I call it the bridge.
I actually call it the bridge theory — I was going to drop “theory,” because it’s just to sound cleverer than it actually is.
But when we’re doing gambling and iGaming ideation, I want the team to present me ideas that bridge the gap — not to the national publications as such, but to personal finance, to relationships, to the glossy mags, for example.
I want relevance, but I don’t want relevance for the sake of shooting ourselves in the foot.
“The best roulette tables 2026” — great, the client might go, “That’s so on brand, that’s perfect.” But try landing that without paying some money.
You’re not going to do it.
What we did here was look at the number of people who admitted to hiding gambling losses from their partner, and it was huge.
I think it was something like 40% in the end who had some iteration of having done it or saying they would do it.
That’s such a large swathe of the population. That’s the bridge in action.
More technically, I work across a framework I call SHARK and a matrix that helps present these ideas to a client.
SHARK is just five checks — a basic acronym. It gets the team to spell out the story they’re trying to sell, the exact hooks of why now, the reach, and the killer headlines, which are really important too. By killer headlines, I want the angles — where are they bridging to?
From that, we’ve been able to create a matrix with four quadrants.
And by the way, me saying “matrix” makes it sound like I’m very good with numbers and maths. I am not. If I can do it, anyone can.
What it’s done is really help with education and understanding from the client from the off. Every idea we present is tagged with broad, relevant, or mix. The idea is to hit the two top quadrants — relevance at the bottom and impact at the top. So slightly less relevance but high impact, and then high impact and high relevance.
When you present that to the client at the beginning, you still get the classics — the luckiest states 2026, the luck, the chance.
Those are always going to be part of the toolkit. They won’t always win awards for ideas, but they’ll still create some impact.
Then you have the Gambling Trend Survey, which is high impact and high relevance.
Once these are all plotted on the graph, I’ve seen so much greater uptake from clients just from understanding authority builders and reach builders — and how, if you use them together correctly across a contract, it really does work.
I have a great team under me — fantastic ideators — and now we don’t see anything lower than a six on relevance.
We present the top two quadrants, but in that top-right quadrant of high relevance and high impact, I’ve got a graveyard’s worth of digital PR ideas ready to go.
So that’s how I tackle it: the SHARK method, the matrix, the bridge.
But at the end of the day, it’s just good digital PR. Clear messaging to the team and clear messaging to the client.
I know you’re going to touch on this, but on whether clients understand how hard it is to land these links — it’s a complete mixed bag.
In my time in digital PR, you have clients that are fully on board and know every in and out of digital PR because they have an internal team. Then there’s a large proportion of clients that maybe have more of an SEO background and less digital PR.
What helps is explaining the cadence period with these high-relevance campaigns from the off — I’m talking contract stage, when you’re onboarding.
If I’m going to land links for highly relevant topics, there’s a natural cadence period in both the UK and the US for these things to land.
The perfect example, once again, is the VIP Grinders survey.
I think it took probably three weeks for the first link to come in.
Then there was another two to three weeks until we had a large deluge come in. I think we’re sitting at about 31 links now for this campaign, with multiple angles still to go.
It’s about getting the client to know that this is quality, newsworthy work that’s of interest to journalists.
It’s just gambling and iGaming.
One thing for everyone to remember when you’re doing this through digital PR: even if it’s the best, most relevant campaign in the world, journalists will probably always have other industries — say health and personal finance specifically — whose stories will sit at the top.
They will eventually come to your great story. It’s just about revisiting and touching base.
That’s my long-winded way of answering your question, Vince.
Sorry about that one.
Do gambling brands understand the limitations and restrictions when they come to you?
Lee Mitchell: I’d say VIP Grinders specifically, yes.
They definitely understood, and they’ve been great with accepting the direction of the ideation, as well as understanding cadence.
But that isn’t the case for all brands. I’m coming up on a decade of digital PR now, with a lot of experience in iGaming and gambling, and it isn’t the norm off the bat.
I don’t think it’s much of an issue, but the education part should always come at the contract and internal and external onboarding phase.
It isn’t something you should be dropping on a client six weeks in. If you already get the vibe that they don’t quite know, you’ve already waited too long.
That’s where tools like putting out a run rate from the get-go help — to show there’s a slow period at the beginning while we build our campaigns and source our data, and then we land with journalists. We base that on historic success and achievements in the industry.
It’s not, “I’m going to pluck a number out of the air and hope I hit it in month two.”
You will be found out.
It’s all about education, because not every client comes to you knowing this. It’s also really important to note that when a client in iGaming or gambling comes to you with their idea of what a broad ideation remit is, clarity needs to be had from the go.
You need to know what they mean, because we’ll always go down the relevance route.
If they’ve worked in digital PR before and they actually just want, say, the best-looking towns in the US — one of those campaigns — that’s not really what we do, or the thing that would move them.
Vince Nero: A little too broad.
Lee Mitchell: Yeah — “What are your chances of finding a really attractive person in this state?” It’s just not a needle mover at the end of the day.
So it’s education, education, education — as I’d probably say on a big placard.
How do you convince a brand that a headline about hiding gambling losses is good for them?
Lee Mitchell: I’m just so good at persuading people — what can I say? On a good day!
No, essentially, it gives us a great opportunity to use our expert commentary — VIP Grinders themselves — to shine a light on something that’s happening.
It’s not a dirty little secret. We can pretend it doesn’t exist, but it does exist.
We all know it exists.
And we can be part of the conversation that holds our hands up and says: this does exist. This is part of the industry. It’s not a good part of the industry. We don’t want to be part of this part of the industry — we want to be part of the solution.
Gambling in and of itself is the nuclear football. But people are going to gamble, and these sites do exist.
So the best thing in this framing is that people do it responsibly. And that’s not just for them — that’s where the emotional hook kicks in, with the family ramifications, work ramifications, and personal finance ramifications.
Being one of the brands brave enough to stand up and flag that is good for link value, which has been proven.
But the sentiment in the vast majority of these publications has been inclusive of our expert commentary, and of flagging that we’re the ones who are going to stand up and say this exists — we’re not going to pretend it doesn’t.
I think that’s what sold them on it: the bravery to not just stick to the status quo and keep running the luckiest states here and there.
Which, as I’ve said, is perfectly fine and legitimate.
It will pick up links, and it’s a good campaign to have as an evergreen part of the toolkit.
But these are the campaigns that move the needle — for brand sentiment as well.
These days we have more and more ability to track that, but I think in a few years’ time we’ll be able to see the true impact of how this can change things not just for the brand, but for the industry.
It’s an industry that’s maligned in a lot of circles.
It’s viewed as dark, perception-wise, by the broad public.
And as I said at the beginning, you’ve got — I think it might be 53 or 57% — of Americans who have gambled in the last year, and in the UK it’s 47%.
This is a thing that exists. It happens.
Being part of the serious conversation is a public service.
Morally, as well as for the links, I think it positions you as the best possible brand in this space. And I think that’s what sold it.
Vince Nero: You’re touching on true public relations — getting ahead of a conflict or a bad headline before it leaks.
If there’s news about to come out about VIP Grinders or gambling, VIP Grinders should be the first to address it and put a positive light on it, so it doesn’t feel like they’re hiding it.
That’s a very traditional PR mindset, and I think it’s an important through line with digital PR.
Too often digital PR is seen as just an SEO goal.
Hopefully nowadays, with AI and the brand sentiment stuff we’re talking about, people are starting to see the bigger picture.
This is a really great way to frame it, because it’s a constant, very real thing for the gambling industry.
You’re almost an advocate for the gambling support lines and that type of stuff. If you can align your brand with the positives, you’re in a better space.
Is there anything we didn’t cover that you want listeners to know?
Lee Mitchell: That’s a huge question! No, I think we’ve covered everything, and I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you.
I think it all comes down to the ideation stage and the communication stage with clients. So ideation and education — probably the two soundbites for the end. I really appreciate your time, Vince.
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