creative casino promotion tactics and publicity stunts explained
Online casino marketing stunts are publicity moves that earn press coverage a restricted advertising budget cannot buy, and the best-documented case is GoldenPalace.com. In November 2004 the casino paid $28,000 on eBay for a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich said to show the Virgin Mary, then kept buying odd items for years. This guide covers what it bought, what it cost, and what the category can still learn.
Originally published February 2025. Updated October 17, 2026. Part of EPR's Gambling Public Relations coverage.
What did GoldenPalace.com actually buy?
GoldenPalace.com bought a run of novelty items at auction and turned each purchase into a news story. The table lists the documented cases with their reported prices and sources.
Stunt
Date
Reported price
Source
Grilled cheese sandwich said to show the Virgin Mary
The Register's report on the sandwich noted that the casino had also bought the Beckham ball. Wikipedia lists further purchases, including a car previously owned by Pope Benedict XVI and a monkey species named for the casino, but EPR found no primary price source for those and has left them out.
How did the grilled cheese stunt unfold?
The grilled cheese stunt unfolded as a single news story that the casino did not have to explain. Seller Diana Duyser said she took a bite a decade earlier and saw a face in the sandwich, according to Fox News, and eBay initially pulled the listing because it did not post joke items before restoring it.
GoldenPalace.com confirmed it placed the winning bid, and its chief executive Richard Rowe said the casino planned to use the sandwich to raise money for charity. Spokesman Monty Kerr told the Miami Herald the item was "immediately and widely recognizable." The same sequence repeated with the pretzel, when spokesman Jon Wolf told CBS News the casino thought the notoriety was worth the price.
Why did these stunts earn coverage?
The stunts earned coverage because each one was a complete story that a wire service could file in a few sentences. EPR's reading is that three features did the work.
The object was already news, so editors did not need the casino's product to be interesting.
The price was small and specific, which made a headline easy to write.
The casino's role was a single act, a winning bid, that it could confirm the same day.
The same pattern appears in other stunt formats. EPR's guide to what a publicity stunt is explains why a story that resolves quickly and costs little is easier to carry than a campaign.
What did the stunts not prove?
The stunts did not prove a business result, because no sales or sign-up figure for them appears in the sources EPR reviewed. The documented outcome is coverage by Fox News, NBC News, CBS News, The Register and UPI, which reported the purchases as odd news.
Scorecard measure
Documented result
Reach
Wire and national coverage of individual purchases; no total audience figure found
Earned media total
No audited figure found
Originality
High; few brands bought novelty items as a repeated strategy
Business results
No published figures found
There is also a reputational limit. The coverage framed the casino as a buyer of novelties, which fit a brand built on attention but would not suit an operator that needs to look conservative to regulators or partners.
How do other online casino brands build attention?
Most other online casino brands build attention through sponsorships, endorsements and partnerships rather than stunts. EPR covers those approaches separately.
Online casinos operate in a category where paid advertising is restricted in many markets, so a stunt that earns news coverage can reach people that paid media cannot. GoldenPalace.com's purchases are the best-documented example.
How much did GoldenPalace.com pay for the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich?
GoldenPalace.com paid $28,000 on eBay in November 2004, according to Fox News and NBC News.
What else did GoldenPalace.com buy?
It paid $10,600 for a pretzel said to resemble the Virgin Mary and, according to Wikipedia, $25,000 for William Shatner's kidney stone and $75,100 for a plastic French fry from a McDonald's Super Bowl commercial.
Did the stunts increase GoldenPalace.com's business?
No sales figure for the stunts appears in the sources EPR reviewed. The documented result is news coverage of each purchase.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team is the staff byline for news, analysis and features on communications, reputation, AI visibility and digital discovery. Everything-PR has published since 2009. AI tools assist with research and drafting, and every article is reviewed by a human editor before publication. Coverage follows the Editorial Policy, and substantive corrections are noted on the article under the Corrections Policy.
