Building Betmate’s Bobblehead Universe
To support Betmate’s social-first betting platform, we developed a scalable series of AI-backed bobblehead characters designed to capture the emotion, rivalry and humour of matchday. Built using real reference imagery and refined through a bespoke AI and Photoshop workflow, the characters became a flexible creative system. What started as a playful character concept evolved into a high-volume, performance-ready campaign asset rooted in personality and precision.
What started as a set of plainly clothed characters quickly evolved into a scalable creative system. As the campaign expanded, the bobbleheads became a recurring feature across fixture-based ads, with characters dressed in the relevant team shirts for each promoted match. By integrating specific kits, the creative became instantly contextual and recognisable, allowing the bobbles to seamlessly adapt to different fixtures while maintaining a consistent visual identity. This approach transformed them from standalone illustrations into a flexible campaign asset that could be adapted week by week to the football calendar.
Our Process
Using real reference imagery of UK football fans as inspiration, we built out distinct characters through a combination of ChatGPT and Midjourney, carefully shaping prompts to capture personality, expression and authentic supporter energy. Once generated, each character was meticulously refined to clean up imperfections, enhance detail and create a cohesive visual style. When the project evolved into incorporating football shirts, we developed a specialised AI workflow in Flora, allowing us to efficiently apply accurate team kits to each character at scale. After minor Photoshop touch-ups, the characters were ready to be placed into statics for campaign rollout.
Some Statistics
Scale became a defining element of the project. In total, we placed 34 different teams’ football shirts onto the bobblehead characters, covering over 50 fixtures across five major competitions: the Premier League, Champions League, La Liga, Scottish Premiership and EFL League One. The Premier League was the core focus, with bobble-led creatives produced for all but two PL teams this season. The breadth of coverage demonstrated not only the versatility of the characters but also the efficiency of the AI-assisted workflow, enabling rapid turnaround across a high volume of match-specific promotions.
