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David Natroshvili, CEO and Founder at SPRIBE, talks about how big-money brand partnerships with the likes of the UFC, WWE and AC Milan are driving brand awareness for its Aviator game locally and internationally.

Aviator is the number one crash game in the world, with more than 50 million active players per month, playing across 5,000 online casinos and with more than 400,000 bets per second being placed on the game. 

These stats are only possible because Aviator has become a game brand with international recognition, while still being able to deliver the experiences players are seeking at a local level. 

But this has meant devising and deploying marketing campaigns that are both international and local, and this has seen us really push the boundaries for how game studios go about driving awareness of their titles among both player and operator audiences. 

With Aviator, we have gone beyond the usual marketing tactics, which are mostly focused on B2B campaigns aimed at operators, and have entered several multi-million-euro, multi-year partnerships with some of the biggest sports franchises and athletes on the planet. 

These partnerships allow us to generate awareness of Aviator at a global level, but also launch hard-hitting campaigns on a local level, too. And it’s this balance between the two that has seen Aviator really take off, becoming the most popular online gambling game of all time. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the deals we have signed over the past few years before going into more detail about how they have allowed us to drive awareness on both the international and local levels. 

Packing a punch with big-name partnerships

Our first showstopper partnership was with the UFC, where we signed a multi-year deal to bring Aviator branding inside the world-famous Octagon at UFC Fight Night and Pay Per View events. 

It also created a brand ambassador fund for us to use to strike individual brand ambassador deals with specific UFC superstars – to date, we have joined forces with the likes of Tom Aspinall, Alex Pereira, Johnny Walker and Merab Dvalishvili.We have since extended our agreement with UFC sister-company, the WWE, with Aviator branding being showcased at certain marquee events. 

We also have a similar partnership with AC Milan, the iconic Italian football club that competes in the domestic Serie A league as well as major European championships such as the Champions League, which it has won an impressive seven times. Under the deal, Aviator is the official crash game of AC Milan, with branding appearing across its legendary San Siro stadium. 

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Superstar athletes are also Aviator brand ambassadors

We’ve also built a roster of athlete brand ambassadors who promote Aviator to their fan bases. This includes the UFC fighters mentioned previously, as well as Indian cricket heroes Suresh Raina and Yuzvendra Chahal. 

Then we have a social media influencer come boxer, Jully Poca who is big in Brazil and has been pushing Aviator to her combined audience of around 10 million people since August last year. 

What makes these partnerships so effective is that they grow brand awareness internationally and nationally at the same time. 

Two birds, one stone.

Take our deal with the UFC, for example. The UFC is hugely popular in North America, but with its Fight Night and PPV events broadcast around the world. This is combined with our brand ambassadors, who have local fan bases as well as being internationally recognised.

Johnny Walker, for example, is a Brazilian fighter and has a huge fan base in his home country, but he’s also internationally popular. This allows us to tap into Johnny’s audience both locally in Brazil and his wider network of fans around the world.

The same applies to our deals with Suresh Raina and Yuzvendra Chahal – they have predominantly allowed us to make significant inroads in the Indian market with Aviator, but, at the same time, are helping to drive awareness in other markets where cricket is big. 

Breaking boundaries.

Our approach to marketing Aviator has absolutely broken boundaries, both geographically and in terms of the scale and scope of the partnerships we have entered. 

The challenge for any brand, and we do see Aviator as a brand, is to achieve international recognition while still being authentic to local audiences. By striking the partnerships we have discussed above, we have been able to do both, and this has been a factor in the success we have enjoyed. 

To put that success into numbers, when we entered our first marketing deal with the UFC, Aviator had 10 million active players per month. A little over a year later, that number has surpassed 50 million. 

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