Every December, marketing teams publish recaps, trend forecasts, and decks explaining why everything they did was intentional.
This is not that.
Rather, this is my year-end marketing awards. I made them up because this is my column and I can. These are for the campaigns, strategies, and decisions that made sense, matched reality, and respected the audience.
These awards are unofficial and entirely subjective, which is why they’re all 100% correct. Also, because awards are meant to be exciting, I’m adding exclamation points and I will not apologize for my joy.
Caesars Entertainment
Award: Marketing That Actually Connected Everything!
Caesars didn’t reinvent anything in 2025. Their marketing worked, because Caesars Rewards anchored everything from resorts to sportsbook to igaming. The program acted as infrastructure rather than messaging, which made the strategy easy to explain and difficult to disrupt. It wasn’t flashy, but it held.
Aristocrat Gaming
Award: Responsible Gaming Without Being Annoying!
Aristocrat managed to talk about responsible play without sounding like a substitute teacher confiscating phones, which in RG-world is a genuine achievement. Know Your Max treated the audience like adults and they responded accordingly. Funny how that works. The message fit into the broader experience instead of feeling bolted on.
BetMGM
Award: Celebrity That Didn’t Make It Weird!
BetMGM’s partnership with Jon Hamm worked, thanks to avoiding the most common celebrity-marketing failure: allowing the celebrity to become the entire campaign. Hamm supported the brand rather than overshadowing it and the execution felt familiar, confident, and self-aware. The result aligned with, instead of distracting from, BetMGM’s positioning.
IGT
Award: Didn’t Panic! Didn’t Break Anything!
IGT’s approach in 2025 was defined by restraint. The messaging stayed product-first, with no abrupt shifts in identity or positioning. This strategy did exactly what it needed to do by reassuring operators, regulators, and boards that stability remained the priority. In gaming, that kind of steadiness is often the most defensible choice.
Pavilion Payments × Global Gaming Women
Award: Group Project That Didn’t Suck!
Pavilion Payments set up a selfie wall at G2E with a simple premise. If you took a photo, posted it on LinkedIn, and tagged it, Pavilion donated to Global Gaming Women. That was the entire campaign. It raised real money, kept the booth busy throughout the show, and made its value immediately obvious. It takes about half a second to understand why it worked.
FanDuel
Award: Made Being the Default Look Easy!
FanDuel spent 2025 reinforcing what a lot of players already believe: This is simply where you go. The marketing showed up consistently across broadcast, digital, and partnerships without trying to reintroduce or reinvent the brand. Nothing was overexplained and nothing tried to be clever. Maintaining default status at scale takes discipline and FanDuel treated that discipline as the strategy.
DraftKings
Award: Didn’t Dumb It Down!
DraftKings’s marketing in 2025 assumed a knowledgeable audience and spoke accordingly. The focus stayed close to product depth, features, and mechanics rather than broad lifestyle storytelling. That approach will not appeal to everyone, but it plays well with engaged users and long-term value players. DraftKings chose clarity over mass charm and seemed comfortable with the tradeoff.
Eilers & Krejcik
Award: Everyone Else Did Their Marketing!
No matter how Eilers & Krejcik approached marketing in 2025, the outcome was the same. Their charts appeared in board decks, conference slides, LinkedIn posts, and approximately every Canva document ever created. When other people do the posting, that’s influence.
Play’n GO
Award: Brand That Didn’t Copy Anyone!
Play’n GO continues to benefit from having a clear sense of identity and committing to it. Their brand voice, design, and positioning resonates most strongly in European and LatAm markets, where that clarity is already understood and rewarded. In the U.S., awareness is still developing, but the underlying foundation is firmly in place. The strategy reads as deliberate and patient rather than reactive, increasingly rare in a crowded category.
What connects all of these examples is clarity rather than spectacle. Each initiative was easy to understand, defensible in internal conversations, and resilient under regulatory and budgetary scrutiny. In an industry where marketing is often asked to justify itself repeatedly, these made their case the first time.