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I wrote a post last year about my take on the top 3 egaming companies that are (were) winning with Brand – and I had a look at it recently based on some of the various financial results posted by both Ladbrokes and William Hill.
The message in the post was that I felt that Ladbrokes weren’t winning with Brand (in particular) and I think that the recent dropping of their incumbent agency, combined with a poor set of financial results underlines that.
When I heard (through the egaming grapevine) late last year, that The Nation Traffic was effectively going to be turned into Ladbrokes Israel, I thought (and still think) – that’s a great deal. They (The Nation Traffic) have proved time and time again to be right at the cutting edge of delivering the best set of results for (Playtech based) egaming brands. Aggressive, is also a polite way of describing some of their tactics – but they get great results.
Everyone (with experience) also knows that the Playtech IMS (their back-office / CRM / player management suite) is virtually streets ahead of what’s available from other platform providers. If Ladbrokes can get over the technical hurdles of getting the full integration done with Ladbrokes legacy systems – and get cracking with Israeli digital marketing expertise – I think that they’ve got a great chance of turning those poor digital results around.
Another key area for them will be better real time delivery of marketing collateral based on transactional activity. I wrote a post about this a few years ago – and things have definitely moved on since then. This is probably also an area where (given Ladbrokes scale) they can improve and the Israeli crew will push hard here.
One personal observation is that I think that they’ve probably got a lot of ground to make up in their Casino verticals – even simply in terms of design & UI. They need to rip them up and start again. There’s little innovation there. This is where some of the more Scandinavian focused brands (Mr. Green, Unibet, Betsson.com) – are worth them looking at. Given the size of Ladbrokes customer base – Casino should be booming. I get the feeling it’s not.
But maybe Playtech + Ladbrokes Israel (and all that experience) can change that…
A pub conversation with some very smart industry people, had them all talking about now is the time to buy Ladbrokes shares. Let’s see do people put their money where there mouth is…
And yes, that was a particularly gratuitous picture of cute girl. But it was kind of relevant. And it made some of you come here in the first place. That’s marketing for you.
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