From pens and posters to digital displays

From rolling posters in 2001 to managing content across entire shop networks today, Pete Lowndes-Burt, founder of Sports Alive, reflects on 25 years of change in betting shop marketing—and the challenges facing independent operators in an increasingly competitive market.

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In 2001, I was rolling posters.

Courier collections ran on their own clock, handwritten boards changed between races, and poster tubes gathered in the corner, reminding you the weekend was getting closer. If you wanted a betting shop to look ready, someone had to make that happen. In most independent shops, that meant whoever had time.

That was the gap Sports Alive stepped into.

Independent operators ran shops on personality and local knowledge. They were very good at that. But what they didn’t have was consistency on the marketing side. No agency was interested in an independent bookmaker with one shop on the high street. So either the operator did it themselves, in some cases, badly and late, or it didn’t get done.

We started with posters and point-of-sale materials. As basic as that was, it solved a real problem. Shops looked ready for the weekend without someone scrambling to sort it at the last minute.

Things started to feel different once clients started installing screens in shops. Digital posters initially. That might sound like a small change. It wasn’t. The moment a shop has a screen, the content has to keep moving. You can’t print once and leave it like you could with posters. Suddenly, the work was constant, and that changed what Sports Alive had to be.

The arrival of SSBTs changed things again. Self-service betting terminals started to appear in independent shops, but most of them looked identical. Same promotions. Same generic content. You could walk into different shops and feel like you were looking at the same business.

We saw an opportunity there. Independents still wanted their own identity in the shop, and the terminals needed to reflect that too.

A national moment in 2022 showed how different the job had become. When Queen Elizabeth II died, all the existing content had been removed from screens and replaced with graphics reflecting the news within 30 minutes.

In the old poster days, that kind of change would have taken the best part of a week. Someone would have needed to design it, print it and dispatch it to shops around the country. With digital screens, the reaction was immediate, and the shops reflected the mood of the country almost in real time.

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The product list today looks nothing like it did in 2001. SSBTs, FOBTs (fixed-odds betting terminals), screen banks and digital posters all became part of the shop environment. Suddenly, everything needed updating, and it all needed to work together. Every screen in the shop started competing for attention. The SSBT content mattered. The digital poster above the counter mattered. Shops became much busier places visually, with content everywhere you looked.

Once all those screens arrived, the workload changed completely.

That’s where the outsourced model started making sense differently. It was never just about saving money on a designer. It was about having someone who understood the full picture. All the screens, all the content, all the backend setup, all working together, so the operator wasn’t trying to manage it all themselves.

The reality for small independents today is much tougher than it was. There are fewer small independents than there used to be, and the ones still operating are dealing with cost pressures that barely existed ten years ago.

Running a small estate is expensive, and the gulf between what a large national can invest in its shops and what an independent can manage has widened. Standing still stopped being an option years ago, and the operators who understood that are the ones still in business.

The conversations I’m having with operators at the moment keep coming back to the same things. Political attitudes towards gambling are changing, and nobody is quite sure where things will settle. Tax changes are putting pressure on already-thin margins. The operators thinking ahead are asking how they can keep shops looking fresh without spending money they haven’t got.

Twenty-five years later, the question is still how independent operators can compete and survive without having the time, budget or infrastructure of the larger nationals.

The poster tubes are long gone. The problem they were solving hasn’t changed that much.

About Sports Alive

Sports Alive, part of Digital Screen Services, has supported independent betting shop operators for 25 years through retail marketing, digital signage and in-shop promotional content. They work with operators across the UK betting sector, providing services including digital posters, SSBT content, screen bank management, gaming machine attracts and point-of-sale materials.

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