TikTok videos by Sunny Hampton, left, and Mackenzie Brooks.Supplied
Sunny Hampton admits she started offering sports betting tips as a bit of a joke. She had been placing bets on football for as long as she could remember, back to when she was a kid and her dad would take her to Hawkeyes games at the University of Iowa, and he’d explain the spread and ask her where they should put their (well, his) money.
Later, as a marketing student at that same university, Ms. Hampton would place wagers through her own bookie, then tell her friends to text their boyfriends which bets she was taking. The boyfriends were confused: How had their girlfriends suddenly become experts? “It was funny,” she said in an interview last week.
In February, 2021, two days before the Super Bowl, Ms. Hampton fired up TikTok and made a 12-second video that riffed on the advice she’d given her friends back in college. “Okay, girls,” she began, “If you want to impress your boyfriend, text him right now and say, ‘Are you taking the Chiefs on Sunday minus three-and-a-half or are you taking the Bucs, moneyline?’ and let me know what they say.” The clip snagged more than 1.1 million views.
She began making regular TYBF (“Text your boyfriend”) videos announcing her picks for NFL, college football and March Madness matchups. Her follower count – mainly women, she says – grew to almost 50,000. Some of them began to bet for themselves, feeling more confident after learning the lingo and the lines from her videos.
“It’s a big deal when they win their first sports bet,” she said. “It just feels good to participate in something that has been predominantly a male space and feel strong as a woman that you made the right choice.”
With women’s sports ascending and Taylor Swift bringing millions of new female fans to the NFL last season, the sports gambling industry is realizing women are an enormous potential new market. Last fall, Ms. Hampton struck a partnership with the sportsbook Betway for the duration of the NFL season, joining a wave of marketing by and for women that is leveraging messages of female empowerment to cultivate a new sisterhood of sports bettors.
Last spring, CBS Sports hired Mackenzie Brooks as a statistical analyst right out of college, where she had studied data analytics and computer coding. She had made a name for herself with easy-to-understand explainer videos, including a TikTok posted at the beginning of the 2022-2023 NFL season “Sports Betting 101 for the girlies.”
Ms. Brooks now hosts a daily online picks show for CBS’s Sportsline betting brand but also continues making TikToks for her own account, including a recent series of three videos that explained sports betting concepts as they might be applied to the romance reality TV show The Bachelor. She speaks the language of her audience.
There are few publicly available metrics to gauge the current size of the women’s sports betting market in North America, but last month BetMGM announced 51 per cent more women used its sportsbook to wager on this year’s Super Bowl than last year’s; a company spokesperson cited “the Taylor Swift effect.” And after Penn Entertainment changed its sportsbook branding from the bro-heavy Barstool Sports to ESPN Bet last summer, the company reported a year-over-year rise of 35 per cent in the number of females in its digital database as of the fourth quarter of 2023.
Last spring, Val Martinez, a former investment banker, launched BettingLadies.com, an online community that aims to demystify sports betting for women. Boasting the motto “Bet like a lady,” the site provides betting guides for the major North American men’s sports leagues as well as the WNBA and the NWSL, tips on how to choose a sportsbook and basic betting tools such as an online calculator to help prospective bettors translate odds (-150? +325?) into real dollar figures.
The site is what is known as an affiliate marketer, earning a commission for each user who joins one of its sportsbook partners – FanDuel, Caesars, BetMGM or Bet365 – by clicking through from BettingLadies.com or one of its social-media posts.
After living in Italy and England, where betting on sports is woven into the cultural fabric, Ms. Martinez had moved to the U.S. in 2018, shortly before a Supreme Court decision there led to an explosion of legalized, regulated sports betting across the country.
“I was waiting for someone to address the women demographic,” she said. “If you tune in to these sports betting channels on TV, it is incredibly boring. You have, generally, three white men talking about the game and the odds. It’s not entertaining, it’s not fun. You didn’t see any women that looked normal, on TV.”
“It was intimidating,” she added. “That’s why we’re trying to create educational videos and training materials to be very approachable, to feel very relatable, safe, inclusive.”
BettingLadies.com is certainly different. It has a horoscope section that offers recommended bets based on users’ zodiac signs, and an interactive online tarot reading in which users pick six cards that determine what sort of bettor they are (“Ambitious achiever” / “Patient strategist” / “Reflective realist” etc.), resulting in a suggested bet to match their personality.
On International Women’s Day earlier this month, Ms. Martinez published a book of interviews with more than 20 women in the sports, media and gambling industries that was distributed to BettingLadies members. Titled What Women Want in Sports Betting, the volume toggles between messages of female empowerment, advice on how to navigate the world of business as a woman, and information about the gambling industry. It is studded with inspirational lines about women working together to change the world.
Empowerment is embedded in the mission of The Gist, a Toronto-based sports media company that seeks to, as it says, “level the playing field” by arming its subscribers – known as GISTers, 85 per cent of whom are women – with enough information about what’s going on in the world of sports to feel comfortable if the subject comes up in a social or work setting.
As the NFL kicked off its 2022-2023 season, The Gist unveiled a step-by-step sports betting guide as part of a brand partnership with the sportsbook FanDuel, and a glossary for newbies. It also began including odds and other betting-oriented content in its newsletter, a chatty, conversational, pop-culture-inflected missive sent to inboxes four times a week.
The Gist co-founder Ellen Hyslop said in an interview that the company hadn’t felt the same blowback as the cable TV sports networks have from viewers upset with a perceived flood of sportsbooks ads. “We really try to do it in a very tasteful manner, and in a manner that’s tied with the content,” she explained.
FanDuel CEO Amy Howe told a trade journal in the fall of 2022, when the company signed the deal with The Gist, that “research showed that many GISTers have expressed intimidation when trying to get involved in sports betting.” She added that, “sports betting has the ability to enhance sports fandom and foster community. Our goal is to lower the barriers and bring the experience of sports betting to everyone.”