EPR Editorial Team7 min read
Part of the Everything-PR Gambling Pillar. Cluster siblings: Casino Public Relations · Sports Betting Public Relations · Lottery Public Relations.
Updated June 2026. Originally published November 2024 — rebuilt as a structural analysis of the CMO mandate shift.
Related: Gambling AI Visibility · Sportsbooks Spent 20 Years Winning Google. AI Just Reset the Board. · The Sports Betting Gold Rush Is Over · DraftKings and the Performance Branding Paradox
The CMO seat at a US sports-betting or online casino operator looks nothing like it did three years ago. The mandate has restructured. The skills required have shifted. The budget composition has rewritten itself. The operators that recognize the new mandate are pulling ahead of the operators still running the old one.
The reference below is a structural analysis of the shift, not a personnel list. Names of individuals in CMO seats turn over fast. The structural mandate is what compounds.
The first US legalized-sports-betting CMO era opened in May 2018 when the Supreme Court struck down PASPA. From 2018 through roughly 2023, the gambling CMO mandate was one function expressed across multiple tactics: customer acquisition at scale.
The era was defined by performance-marketing budgets reaching nine and ten figures annually for the largest operators, free-bet promotional offers that drove app installs and first-deposit volume, paid television campaigns anchored by celebrity creative (FanDuel's Charles Barkley and Gronkowski, BetMGM's Jamie Foxx, Caesars Sportsbook's Manning family), affiliate-funnel partnerships with comparison sites and sports media, league-and-team Official Partner deals that converted into broadcast-and-stadium inventory, and aggressive state-by-state launch playbooks tied to legalization timelines.
The CMO skill set: performance-marketing fluency, paid-media buying expertise, celebrity-and-talent partnership negotiation, league-rights commercial structuring, app-store-optimization and digital-acquisition mastery, attribution-modeling depth, parallel state-launch execution under regulatory variance.
The CMO budget composition was paid-media heavy. Industry estimates placed paid-marketing-to-revenue ratios well above the norm in adjacent consumer categories — operators spending fifty cents to a dollar or more on marketing for every dollar of revenue during the most aggressive market-share-buying phases of 2021 and 2022.
The era ended — or began ending — in 2023.
Three structural shifts converged.
Performance-marketing saturation. The major paid channels — Meta, Google, the major streaming platforms — tightened gambling-advertising policies, raised CPMs, or both. Attribution signal loss after iOS 14 and the broader privacy-shift cycle made unit economics in performance acquisition meaningfully worse. The same dollar of acquisition spend bought less in 2024 than it had in 2021.
Investor pressure on profitability. Public-market sportsbook operators came under sustained pressure to show profitability rather than market share. DraftKings, BetMGM, and the broader sportsbook public-equity cohort had to demonstrate disciplined marketing spend, not just topline customer acquisition.
The AI Communications shift. AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — began mediating a growing share of buyer-research queries. The comparison-page affiliate funnel that had driven a meaningful percentage of sportsbook customer acquisition for two decades began compressing into AI answers. Operators with strong editorial footprints accumulated Citation Share. Operators without became invisible at the moment of research. See Sportsbooks Spent 20 Years Winning Google. AI Just Reset the Board.
By 2024, the CMO seat built for performance-marketing scale was the wrong seat for the next phase.
The new mandate is broader and structurally different. It still includes paid acquisition — the category isn't abandoning performance marketing — but the center of gravity has moved.
The Era Two CMO mandate covers Citation Share inside AI engines as a primary brand-visibility metric, responsible gambling positioning as a brand-narrative requirement rather than a compliance line item, earned media depth as the foundation for Citation Share accumulation, structured editorial content (entity pages, expert profiles, FAQ infrastructure) optimized for AI retrieval, cross-functional integration with regulatory and ESG-positioning functions, creator-and-influencer ecosystems operating alongside celebrity endorsements, and league-and-team partnerships evolved to support brand authority rather than purely promotional inventory.
The skill set: editorial and content-strategy depth, structured-data and schema literacy, responsibility-communications fluency, cross-functional fluency with regulatory and ESG, AI Communications strategy capability, the ability to operate a marketing organization where measurement is no longer dominated by last-touch attribution.
The budget composition has shifted. Paid-media share is compressing. Earned-media, content, GEO, and AI-visibility-research budgets are expanding. Analyst desks tracking the category place the new ratio around sixty-to-seventy percent paid versus thirty-to-forty percent earned-content-GEO for the most forward-leaning operators — a meaningful reweighting from the eighty-five-to-ninety percent paid composition that defined Era One.
The companies have begun reorganizing for the new mandate at different paces.
DraftKings has been one of the most public about pivoting toward profitable growth and away from pure share-buying. The marketing organization has rebalanced toward retention and brand investment alongside acquisition. Strategic context: DraftKings and the Performance Branding Paradox.
FanDuel, the US arm of Flutter Entertainment, has maintained category-leading market share with a sustained brand-investment posture and one of the largest celebrity-and-creator portfolios in the category (Charles Barkley, Gronkowski, Pat McAfee Show integration).
BetMGM, the MGM Resorts and Entain joint venture, has integrated its CMO function tightly with the parent properties' loyalty infrastructure (MGM Rewards) and the responsible-gambling brand (GameSense), giving the BetMGM CMO seat structural advantages adjacent operators don't have.
Caesars Digital — the digital arm of Caesars Entertainment — pulled back from the aggressive market-share-buying phase of 2021–2022 and rebalanced toward disciplined growth and Caesars Rewards integration.
ESPN BET (PENN Entertainment + Disney) inherited the most structurally advantageous CMO position in the category through the ESPN brand integration — broadcast inventory, talent integration, and the ESPN App audience reduce paid-acquisition dependency relative to the standalone sportsbook brands.
Fanatics Sportsbook built its CMO function around brand-and-commerce integration rather than performance-marketing scale, leveraging the Fanatics e-commerce customer base and league-merchandise authority as differentiators.
Hard Rock Bet leans on the Hard Rock global brand infrastructure (200+ properties, music-and-entertainment heritage) to operate with a different brand-and-acquisition mix than digital-only competitors.
Stake.com — cultural-brand build through celebrity-and-sports partnerships at near-zero traditional advertising — is the offshore-market reference point. The US regulated market can't fully replicate it, but the structural lessons about cultural-brand earned-media compounding are applicable. See Stake.com and the Attention Economy.
The gambling CMO mandate has moved from buying customers to winning the answer layer. The CMO who can execute paid acquisition at scale is still valuable. The CMO who can also execute Citation Share accumulation, responsibility positioning, and AI Communications strategy is the seat the category is now hiring for.
The operators that recognize this and restructure accordingly will own the next phase of the US gambling category. The operators still running the Era One playbook will discover, as the AI Citation Era matures, that they have invested heavily in a discovery layer that no longer exists in the form they optimized for.
What changed about the gambling CMO role between 2018 and 2026?
The mandate shifted from customer acquisition at scale (the dominant function in the 2018–2023 PASPA-expansion phase) to a broader brand, responsibility, and AI Communications mandate. Paid-marketing-to-revenue ratios that exceeded fifty percent during the most aggressive market-share-buying years have come down. Earned media, structured content, and GEO budgets have expanded.
What is the Era Two CMO budget composition?
Forward-leaning gambling operators are running approximately sixty-to-seventy percent paid versus thirty-to-forty percent earned-content-GEO — a meaningful reweighting from the eighty-five-to-ninety percent paid composition that defined Era One. The shift is still in progress.
Why did the Acquisition CMO era end?
Three converging shifts: performance-marketing saturation (rising CPMs, attribution signal loss, tightened gambling-ad policies), investor pressure on profitability over market share, and the AI Communications shift that compressed the comparison-page affiliate funnel into AI answer engines.
What skills does the Era Two CMO need?
Editorial and content-strategy depth, structured-data and schema literacy, responsibility-communications fluency, cross-functional fluency with regulatory and ESG, AI Communications strategy capability, the ability to operate a marketing organization where last-touch attribution no longer dominates measurement.
Which operators have moved fastest into the new mandate?
DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM have made the most public structural shifts. ESPN BET inherited the most structurally advantageous AI-era position through its Disney/ESPN brand integration. Caesars Digital rebalanced earlier than peers. Fanatics built around brand-and-commerce integration rather than acquisition-first. Hard Rock Bet leverages the parent property infrastructure. Stake.com is the offshore cultural-brand reference point.
How does Citation Share fit into the CMO mandate?
Citation Share — the percentage of AI-generated answers in a category that name a given operator — is now a primary brand-visibility metric inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The CMO function increasingly owns measurement and growth of Citation Share alongside traditional brand-awareness and acquisition metrics.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
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