Grosvenor Casinos joins the AI marketing fad with designer football shirts

It’s using the tools to put the word out about its new fantasy football game.

UK.- AI image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been a boon for press departments aiming to get a quick and easy story in the press. In recent months, journalists’ inboxes have been flooded with examples of companies using AI to mock up fictional product crossovers in the hope of gaining column inches. 

The gambling sector is also getting on board, and Rank’s casino brand Grosvenor Casinos has jumped on the trend by offering an AI image generator’s take on what Premier League football shirts could look like designed by major fashion houses such as Gucci and Versace. 

Perhaps inspired by how the rather loud Arsenal and Manchester United away kits have been received, Grosvenor Casinos turned to AI to promote its release of its fantasy football game 20Shots. It asked a text-to-image generator to create images of football shirts designed by Versace, Armani, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chanel, Burberry, Gucci. They look predictably horrendous, particularly the Chanel and Burberry-inspired designs.

The content is quick and cheap to produce, with no need to pay for a designer, and it sometimes does the job. After all, here we are talking about it. Let’s hope that this is one marketing trend that passes quickly.

Rank Group reported revenue of £681.9m for its 2022-23 financial year. That’s an increase of 5.9 per cent year-on-year. The company reported growth in all segments following a difficult two years because of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on land-based venues.

Grosvenor Casino remained the largest source of revenue, generating £306.3m. Revenue was up 3.3 per cent although London casinos still performed below pre-pandemic levels due to the lack of visitors from the Middle East and East and South-East Asia. The group permanently closed its Russell Square casino.

However, casino revenue outside of London did better, rising 6 per cent year-on-year. Visitor numbers were up by 7 per cent.