Allwyn has appointed Xénia Olajošová as Group Media Director, putting her in charge of building a single media strategy across the lottery and betting group’s markets.
Olajošová joins from BD, the healthcare technology company, where she led the Centre of Excellence for Marketing Communications. Earlier in her career she held marketing roles at Procter & Gamble, Duracell and Galderma, giving her a background in consumer brands before moving into gambling.
Reporting line and remit
Olajošová reports to Tatiana Jouanneau, Allwyn’s Group Chief Brand Officer. Her brief covers the group’s global media strategy, coordination of media activity across individual markets, and a shared framework for measuring media effectiveness. It also includes identifying where combined media investment across markets could go further, and supporting closer work between Allwyn’s global and local teams.
“Our goal will be to strengthen the consistency of the brand and marketing activities while maintaining the local specificities of individual markets,” Olajošová said.
Jouanneau said Olajošová’s experience managing media transformations at international organisations would support the group’s media capability build-out, and that she would work closely with teams across Allwyn’s markets on shared learning and brand consistency. Allwyn has not disclosed an effective start date for the role, and the company has not said whether the position is newly created or replaces an existing one.
A pan-European brand build-out
The hire follows Allwyn’s selection of Forsman & Bodenfors as its global creative partner earlier in 2026. Building a group media function is the next step in that same brand consolidation effort. Until now, media planning and buying have largely sat with individual markets; a group-level function gives Allwyn a central point for measuring spend and setting standards, rather than leaving effectiveness measurement to each market on its own terms.
That centralisation is a common move for gambling groups that have grown through acquisition, where marketing teams inherited from different companies often run on different systems and report different numbers for the same activity. Olajošová’s task is to make those numbers comparable across markets without stripping out the local knowledge that makes campaigns work in each one, a balance she pointed to directly in her own comment on the appointment.
Allwyn’s scale
Allwyn operates lottery and betting businesses in Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece and Cyprus, and is the UK’s number one lottery operator through the National Lottery licence it acquired in 2024, where it recently launched Powerball. It also works as an operator, supplier and partner to state-run lotteries in North America. The group employs more than 8,000 people. It is now the world’s largest listed lottery business following its merger with Greek operator OPAP, completed in March 2026 and listed on the Athens Stock Exchange. In 2025, Allwyn also acquired PrizePicks, the US daily fantasy sports operator. For 2025, the group generated €4.1 billion in net gaming revenue and returned €4.9 billion to good causes and gaming taxes; Continental Europe alone produced €1.18 billion in GGR in the first quarter of 2026, up 7% year on year. That growth, spread across licensed monopolies, competitive betting markets and a US fantasy sports app, is the backdrop against which Olajošová’s media framework will be judged.
That spread of businesses, from a European lottery monopoly to a US daily fantasy operator, is what makes Olajošová’s mandate a genuine test. A single measurement framework for media effectiveness has to hold up across regulated lottery markets, sports betting, and a fantasy sports product with a different audience and a different regulatory footprint. How that framework performs, and whether it changes how Allwyn’s individual markets buy and plan media, will be the first sign of whether the group’s brand push extends beyond the creative agency roster and into how money actually gets spent.
Source: Allwyn
