betonliamcasey

Author: betonliamcasey

  • Content creation in 2014: what’s next?

    Content creation in 2014: what’s next?

  • Great people, great brand, great new start for me.

    Exciting times. And maybe the best job in egaming for me?

    I’ve just joined the Betsson Group as Managing Director for Betsafe. You can get a great overview of the history of the Betsson Group here.

    It’s full of smart people, great creative ideas, and a real desire to be as successful as possible.

    The Betsafe team are delivering some great brand campaigns, right now – and I’m looking forward to hearing about some of the even bigger & better ideas that are on the way.

    My current favourite? The Gumball work. Check it out…

    This is hugely exciting stuff – as I get more insight, I’ll be posting to pull some of my thoughts together.

  • The top 3 egaming companies that are winning with Brand. My take.

    I’ve been asked recently by a number of people – which egaming companies are killing it on Brand. Who’s done (or doing) the best job in terms of Brand (with a capital B!).

    I’m a Marketer at heart, and I love good design and a well executed brand proposition that’s supported by engaging product.

    In this post, I’m notcommenting on how these egaming companies are executing their marketing ops (ie: CRM + BI reporting +  segmentation & cluster analysis) – as I don’t have any real insight into that (you’d need to be on the inside to get that) – but I AM talking about Brand

    Here are my top three:1. Mr. Green 2. Paddy Power 3. (deep breath) William Hill.

    1. Mr Green

    Why?

    Mr. Green has never been afraid to innovate in terms of Brand. They’ve kept a laser-like focus on their core business (online casino) and their graphic design (in most cases) is first-rate. If you mention Mr. Green to anyone in the industry – the reaction is overwhelmingly positive, which is unusual.

    There is consistency and differentiation in how they present the customer experience – and in Net Ent, they’ve got one of the strongest egaming software partners (they have a good overall mix of providers). Their promotional approach is also unique – in that you have to be a logged in customer to see the promotions – and they push the majority of them through their blog. Great way to reduce marketing overhead. Their top nav is also probably my favourite around.

    There is also an overwhelming sense that these guys love what they do, put the customer first, and are big believers in making sure that fun & excitement is at the forefront of how they present things. It’s something that a lot of egaming companies strive for, but few achieve with any consistency.

    I have them above Paddy Power, because with their single product channel, they’ve allowed themselves the luxury of not having their brand-messaging diluted across multiple verticals. The discussions of other verticals (at Mr. Green) must have gone on (is going on?) well into the night – they may well be on the horizon, but not yet.

    Where could they improve?

    Design & brand positioning is excellent, but homepage is very cluttered from a visual perspective. Their english localisation sometimes needs work too, as syntax can be a little incorrect. I also wonder are they not maximising potential VIP customer acquisitions – due to the “walled garden” approach to the promos. Could they do more on the PR side with Mr. Green the character? Maybe – but I liked the appearance at the EGR awards last year.

    2. Paddy Power

    Why?

    Balls bigger than a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And the smarts to go with it.

    Probably the best managed Brand personality out there. Some of the Brand stunts that they’ve done will be remembered for a long time in the egaming industry. Personal favourite? Their sky tweets over the Ryder Cup.

    They are doing a great job of keeping the focus on the fun part (that so many other egaming firms attempt to do, but do badly) by using humour in a way that’s consistent, funny and executed with style.

    The core thing for me that gets them in the top 3 though, is the way in which they have obviously allowed their staff and marketing teams the latitude to let the fun side of their own personalities shine through.This is not easy – and you have to hire the right people.

    You only have to read some of their site copy, replies to customers or follow some of the accounts on Twitter. Given the speed of response and smartness in some of the answers, it’s clear that the staff have been briefed and have bought into the Brand personality – and then been told to get on with it. This is something that other brands that struggle to develop a Brand personality should well take note of.

    Where could they improve?

    The Brand personality is less obvious within the egaming verticals (compared to Sportsbook). Yes, it’s more difficult as Sportsbook provides a constant stream of news and events to generate buzz about – but maybe there are opportunities (with Poker in particular, and the live event buzz) to push the Brand personality more?

    Talking of Poker, the continued lack of a mobile product is one that needs to be addressed, because if Paddy could gain the same market share of mobile Poker, that they’ve done with Sportsbook – it could go a long way to reverse what is potentially a declining set of Poker revenues. The customer journey (in terms of sign-up & product cashier) also needs work – but that’s somewhat out of their hands, as it’s within the Playtech product.

    I’d be interested to see if they push the boundaries with some of the new product development that’s happening with the Cayetano Casino games. It was a great move buying some Casino infrastructure in the first place and it’s clear from their annual report – that the ARPU is way higher, having taken the software provider cut out of it as well as having the ability to 100% dictate content direction. It’s the way of the future.

    3. William Hill

    Why?

    This one may set the cat amongst the pigeons in terms of industry opinion – but I think since the Playtech takeover (is there any other way of describing it?) of the William Hill online channels, they’ve become far more focused on how to push where they are strong.

    Their above the line campaigns do a good job  of reinforcing “The Home of Betting” positioning, and their online execution has improve an incredible amount since this was a sample splash page in 2009. Their TV ads have focused on a product positioning, and the breadth of choice available – rather than  an emotive based positioning (a la Ladbrokes new campaign). They’ve kept “The Home of Betting” inherent in the message that their scale is massive, and they have stuck to their guns by keeping the messaging consistent through out the site. (This is where I think that Ladbrokes have some work to do, as the current core acquisition message around the passion of betting, pretty much disappears after you leave the home splash page. Why? Ask Ladbrokes…)

    Where could they improve?

    Their heritage positioning is something that needs to be handled sensitively as it’s been an important part of Will Hill’s history. There are probably some more ways that it can be emphasised, in a contemporary way to help retention and reactivation.

    Their affiliate channel needs a makeover to reflect what’s happening with the core brand, and it probably needs to put together even more aggressive deals in the face of savage competition from the “likely lads” affiliate team at Bet 365.

    Who didn’t make top 3 and why?

    Bet 365 – Huge. Massive. Force of nature. But, can you sum up what they stand for from a Brand point of view?

    Ladbrokes – see observations above. They need to drive their big ATL campaigns through the whole site experience.

    Betsson – Brilliant operation- but the pace of their growth is such that I think that they need another year to deliver really consistently from a Brand point of view.

    Betfred – made some bold moves recently with Casino-based homepage wraps – but a personal opinion is that their design has always lacked polish.

    I don’t have time to list everyone – I will come back to this and talk about specific products over the coming weeks.

    If anyone has any thoughts, observations, rants etc – would love to hear. If you think that there’s someone obvious that should be in there – let me know, and I’ll have a look at it – contact me here.

  • Exciting times & big moves…

    Amaya & Cryptologic

    There are exciting industry times afoot. And for me in particular.

    I’ve recently relocated to Malta to run the Wagerlogic operation, which is now part of the Amaya Group.

    Amaya have been on a tear over the last 18 months, buying Chartwell and Cryptologic (amongst other businesses).

    I’ve worked with people at Sports Interaction (the original & the best) and with software suppliers that include Playtech, Microgaming, CTXM, Cake and many more.

    What I’ve seen so far at Wagerlogic has me as excited as anything I’ve seen. Great people, smart management, a hugely exciting plan for the wider group – and the weather & economy in Malta tops it all off nicely.

    I’m moving the whole family over – and the company have been brilliant so far. I’d highly recommend Malta for egaming / online betting professionals, as there’s good infrastructure, plenty of opportunities – and if you pick a growing company, a great opportunity to generate some significant financial rewards.

    Lots more to follow here – and if anyone wants any info on Malta – or fancies a move. You know where to find me!

  • Alderney suspends Full Tilt licence: here’s the regulator’s statement

    Alderney have finally got ’round to suspending Full Tilt Poker.

    Click here to see a copy of the full statement from the regulator.

    It could spell even more trouble for players. More to follow later.

    Update: Looks like operations have fully ceased / been suspended – reports are that all games have stopped, table play was halted – and when I attempted connection – the client just hung.

    This is going to make the interubes pretty hot for a few days. Here’s hoping that players get paid. Here’s a screenshot at midday on the 29th.

    Update: I’ve changed the link to the CORRECT statement – thanks to Peter Nolan (@ptr_nolan)

    Update: Read the railbirds thoughts at 2+2 and get a taste of what are the Poker community thoughts – here.

  • Google Correlate: Your own trend data is your friend?

    Quick post this – I just came across this last night, so I thought I’d put down some thoughts.

    Google’s newest lab rat, is Google Correlate and it complements Google Trends in the sense that it allows you to upload your own data series and look for corresponding data trends.

    Google’s mission statement for this is: “Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends.”

    What’s really interesting is that it works like Google Trends in reverse. With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a series of its frequency over time. But what Google Correlate allows is to enter a data series (the target) and get back queries whose frequency follows a similar pattern.

    What does this mean in real world terms?

    My understanding of this, is that it allows you to upload a series of data, let’s say for example how may people visited your website (and you know that it’s during say a slower period of the year), and they came to your site looking for “widgets”.

    You could take the search term “widgets” and the data series (of visits), upload the info to Google Correlate – and it would spit out other related data streams that follow the same series. This means that (in search terms) you could possibly target online categories that follow a similar online cycle – and further optimise (or spread) your search budget.

    It effectively cuts out all the complicated data analysis required to try and find similar search patterns, but based on your own data. This is where it differs from Google Trends in that all the data is coming from Google in Google Trends – but with Google Correlate you can upload your own data to be queried against what’s already stored by Google. (It’s pretty chunky in that it goes back to 2003, too).

    The maths behind the algorithm etc is pretty complicated – the number wizards out there can check it out here.

    There’s a whitepaper on it here – and the Google FAQ’s are here.

    I haven’t played around with it enough to see of it’s much more than a number-crunching exercise in terms of Google showcasing their ability to generate relevant results, based on your data – but I’m guessing that if it proves to work that it’ll (no surprise) get online marketers spending more online dollars as they try and exploit other data (search) trends that mimic their own.

    In other news, the www.igamingsupershow.com was busy, and it was good to meet so many old faces that had made it to Dublin. I’ll wrap up some thoughts on that, and #bluemonday – when I get time to draw breath.

  • Online Betting: Could Financials get the Moneymaker effect?

    When Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 WSOP Main Event, from a $39 buy in at PokerStars – he ended up creating what was known as “The Moneymaker Effect” – which was summed up saying “staying at home in front of a computer screen could be more profitable than going to work…” (a quote that came from an interview he did with Howard Swains in The Times).

    However, since 2003, online betting & gaming  has become more and more commoditised, as technology and access to content becomes cheaper and more widely available.

    There are now many online betting operators that solely rely on 3rd party software to provide product experience and infrastructure – and solely concentrate their efforts on marketing by brand differentiation. You could compare (for example) the Titan brand that solely uses Playtech for all its products and infrastructure (Titan Poker, Casino, Sportsbook) VS Bet365 that has developed a proprietary platform for its sports-betting and then uses 3rd party partners for its egaming products. (Which has become standard operating procedure for the most successful operators).

    And simply hoping for a “Moneymaker Effect Mk.2″ to drive their business may be a little optimistic.

    What’s this got to do with financial betting?

    The standard online betting operator (that’s either a market leader in a local terrritory, or has a global presence) tends to have at least 4 verticals. Sportsbetting, Casino, Poker, Games. In certain local territories, Bingo is also a staple and Live Casino is where there’s been massive adoption over the last 18 months. But why hasn’t there been more widespread adoption of some relatively simple, high margin financial type offerings, that can be easily integrated using virtually the same technology and infastructure as other online gaming offerings?

    I’m discounting spread-betting because the “hold” requirements are too high for the average man in the street. In the the UK, the average account requires at least £1,000 for any market activity, and that was the average amount attributed to a new account deposit by IG Index in 2010.

    The regulatory requirements in terms of KYC (Know Your Customer) and the documentation is a roadblock too.

    Paddy Power’s experience with offering a spread-betting & CFD product at a more casual customer base, seems to back up the assertion that it’s not a good fit for the classic online betting operator. For definitions of CFD’s see here – but it’s glorified spread-betting. (BTW – I’m actually a big fan of both product types, but I think that they either need to be re-packaged in terms of the “sell”, and targeted at a market segment that could be educated and walked through the process better.) There are opportunities available to potentially be disruptive in this market, as in many countries in Europe, the level of trust that was inherent in the financial advisor / banker / broker relationship – has been badly damaged by much of the economic fallout from recession.

    There’s another financial offering that I think is really interesting – and is yet to be exploited in the B2C market. That’s fixed odds binary options – which are simply a fixed odds bet where the customer decides where a thing (share price, price of a commodity eg: oil, gold, or index (Nikkei, NASDAQ) is going to end up higher or lower than whatever the thing’s price is at, when the bet is placed. (I love that I had to get technical and describe financial instruments as “things”). It can get more complicated than that, but that’s a fairly simple explanation. Wikipedia does variants in-depth.

    If you could tell a customer, that you can bet now on the fact that the price of (for example) oil, will be higher or lower in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour or 24 hours – for as low as €10. It’s a fairly simple proposition. Binary options will allow people to bet on multiple indices, in low amounts, with a margin that’s set by the underlying market provider.

    Basically that means that the market maker (in this case an operator, or to be even more exact, the 3rd party that’s providing the operator with the binary product) can choose what price that they want to pay out on the particular index/commodity etc.

    So, for example – let’s say gold is trading at $100 an ounce, and I place a $10 fixed odds binary bet, that in 5 minutes that price will be more than $100 (doesn’t matter how much more), and in 5 mins, gold is trading at $101. I win my bet. But the payout is fixed at (for example) 70% – so I get paid out $17. If gold is trading at less than $100, I lose my $10. Looks like bad value for the customer (and at those margins it is), but it’s very profitable for the operator. The lack of value, can be more than made up for by the fact that it can be seen as a very low cost to entry to a “sophisticated” market – for a customer who thinks that they’d need to go through broker / equity / other to be able to do that.

    There’s some pretty complicated risk management involved for the market maker, but there are some great 3rd party companies out there who’ve got a solid handle on this already. I’ve talked to a few, and some of the up and coming ones have amazing technology. I think that they need to further simplfy their offerings, get some good B2C marketers involved, link up with established brands, and maybe they’ll start making further inroads with some of the larger multi-product betting operators.

    There may even be some left-field opportunities to develop relationships & binary white labels for companies that have customers who trade or who trade on their behalf – and are looking to be more active in their investment decision-making. The 24/7/365 mobile device enabled environment that we’re surrounded by today would allow consumer investors to react as quickly to newsflow and trade oil / commodities (in reaction to world events) using very simple up/down options – under this model. To make it competitive, the market makers would probably need to adjust their margins to give better value – but it’d sure be interesting to see it happen. You can see a “Play for Fun” example at ladbrokes, if you want to try it out. (Not a massive fan of their interface, but the brand postioning is ok).

    Could fixed odds binary options get the Moneymaker effect? Only time will tell.

  • How the hell does Amazon control 30% of all ecommerce in the US?

    It was only when I read this fantastic article in Techcrunch, that I realised the actual “under the radar” scale of Amazon’s eccommerce business. Sure, they just sell books and CD’s right? Nope.

    And that’s a $34 billion a year in revenue nope.

    That’s like if one company was responsible for 15% if Ireland’s GDP. God knows we could do with it.

    How have they done it? (And this is what’s really interesting to me from an online point of view.)

    They taken some basic online concepts and built scale, on analytics, retention and product experience.

    The global consulting company global consultincompany faberNovel has identified the keys to Amazon’s success as 1) the Internet imposes no limits on how much Amazon can sell; 2) its control of customer accounts and loyalty, and 3) and a growing ecosystem that is helping it cement its place in the world of digital goods as well.

    And this is from a compnay that lost $3billion dollars betwen 1995 and 2003.

    The turnaround is nothing short of an amazing model for how successful, customer focused ecommerce businesses should be turned around and run.

    Their web services business alone effectively runs transactional platforms for massively scaled businesses like Zynga, Netflix, Reddit, Etsy, Dropbox and many more.

    Yet many people think that they just sell books, Cd’s and DVD’s.

    If you’re an internet marketer or in the ecommerce business – you could do worse than reading the great Techcruch article on them here.

  • Is social gaming the future of online gambling?

    I’m still waiting to see how the US shakes out with its ongoing struggle to work out what it wants to do with online gambling. It’ll happen.

    My take is that poker will be first and it’ll regulated on a state by state basis. It’ll be for US companies, and as each state regulates, the company will require infrastructure in each state that it gets a licence in. That’s going to put barriers up for companies that are undercapitalised or who can’t get some type of top-end deal with a regulated network provider. See ipoker.it or pokerstars.fr for what I’m talking about here.

    Online casino games will be next, following a similar path, with sportsbetting being a very distant last. Could be a long time before the NFL / NBA / etc are happy to see it happen.

    However, whatever the DOJ in the US thinks, there’s huge appetite for online games, that have gambling elements attached to them.

    The massive continued growth of Zynga et al, is showing that the social gaming experience is becoming part of the standard online experience for the average Joe. Social gaming companies are big fans of publicising growth metrics and stats, primarily because many are marching on VC money, with IPO being the ultimate aim. The better the numbers, the better the bottom line. It’s not quite the same as many of the online gambling behemoths that are still privately held – so hard & fast numbers are difficult to pin down there.

    Personally, I think that the low barrier to entry and trial for social games combined with their natural brand associations with social networks (and Facebook in particular), are introducing a casual segment of the market to a type of low cost competitive gambling.

    One of the drivers of gamblers in particular, is the belief that they’ve got a more informed or more valid opinion than you, or the house. Why else would you stake your hard-earned cash otherwise? Social gaming is pushing the commoditisation of the gaming transaction. I think this will ultimately lower some of the barriers that stand in the way of online gambling brands, in particular for the US, when regulation happens.

    If you want to get some decent flavour of what’s happening in the social space, there are some good sources worth checking out – and you can make up your own mind about whether social gaming could be the future of online gambling.

    It’s either that, or does someone want to buy my 5 million Zynga Poker credits?

    Here are some good sources to form your own opinion on what Social Gaming’s impact for online gambling may be:

    http://www.insidesocialgames.com/

    http://socialtimes.com/category/social-games

    http://blog.games.com/

    It’s also worth keeping an eye on what Bruce Everiss is talking about – he predated social gaming, but as the guy who took both Imagine and Codemasters to being #1 in the market, he knows his games marketing – check out his blog at: http://www.bruceongames.com/

  • It’s not all champange supernovas and money-pit online marketing.

    It’s not all champange supernovas and money-pit online marketing in the online gambling/gaming business.

    For every high-profile brand that’s splashed over the front and back pages of your local media – there’s many other online gambling businesses that (while household names in their own territories) aren’t as well known on the world stage.

    Some examples that come to mind here would include Unibet, Interwetten, Sports Interaction, Titan Poker, Casino Tropez. Low-key heavyweights across Sportsbook, Casino and Poker – and all online marketing experts.

    Many of these businessses have quietly built exceptional online success stories by either being online marketing innovators, or delivering product or customer experience that is best in class. To do this, they have to recognise trends early, or commit to driving new trends that they believe in.

    So, what have I seen in terms of online marketing trends that may have come out of some of the operators above – or in the space in general?

    Real time delivery of marketing collateral based on transactional activity: Ok, so ad networks and some of the larger ecommerce sites have been doing this for years, but the rise of Live/In Play Betting (in particular) has allowed online gaming companies to identify new channels that customers haven’t accessed (or channels that they may have tried historically) and serve (or re-serve) these in real-time.

    For example, if a customer is on the site, logged in, and betting in-play on a tennis match, a query can be run at the time of log in to see has the customer ever bet on a Casino game or played poker. If they’ve played Casino in the past, serving a banner that launches a “single click to play” game (eg: blackjack), is a low cost, medium impact message with a potentially solid financial upside.

    Due to the fantastic functionality now available through using AJAX, multiple queries can be run on a single page – and then if a marketing message, isn’t working, another relevant message can be served. This is becoming more and more sophisticated, with companies that have core control over their own data and database, able to add custom fields to their databases which can allow greater micro-targeting (of the customer) with the most relevant marketing messages.

    Great examples of solid in-play offerings include: BWIN, Sports Interaction and Betfair (but I’m not sure about Betfair’s new splash page, it’s reduces the consumer’s ability to see multiple options, on multiple markets, at a glance.)

    The continued rise of the “long tail” of products: Internet technology has really driven the commoditisation of information. The delivery of the online betting experience has been augmented by service providers ability to deliver (historically) esoteric and hard to find information. For example, as I write this, BWIN has 8513 markets available to bet on, or would you like to bet on Paraguayan 3rd division football in real time at Paddy Power?

    3rd party service providers like Bet Genius now shoulder most of the hard work in terms of aggregating content and delivering it to online betting operators. The more markets that they can provide, the more the operators will take – and I can assure you, that people will bet on them. In similar fashion, online casinos began with 30-40 games, and today, Playtech’s core download casino and Microgaming’s Quickfire platform – both have over 200 games. And they all get played. I can tell you that, again, from experience. That brings me on to…

    The rise of branded game/content:

    This has probably been one of the biggest growth areas in terms for egaming software providers, and by extension, their licensees and customers.

    It’s actually quite a simple equation. How do you build confidence in a product that’s virtual, and (often) for a brand that has little market penetration? Or, how do you entice a casual sports-bettor to play Casino games, when they a have little interest?

    Simple. Find a well-known and naturally trusted brand that resonates with a certain demographic – and use it as a theme for an already developed game. And then put that game in front of that demographic.

    Biggest examples incude the first ever branded slot, Tomb Raider (from Microgaming in 2004), Gladiator (Playtech) and X-Men (Cryptologic). There’s a good showreel of Playtech’s branded slots here.

    The trusted brand helps overcome some of the inherent mistrust of remote games presented by lesser brands – and it drives cross-sell and adoption for more established egaming operators, for a customer base that may have little interest in more traditional casino games. I can tell you from experience that it’s  win/win for everyone.

    Licensing deals with popular culture media rights owners (Marvel, Eidos, Paramount, etc) are where the software suppliers are concentrating much of their business and market product development focus.

    There’s a struggle with social media:

    The struggle is that a lot of online marketers are scratching their heads around the tipping point where COO’s etc, are looking for solid quantifiable returns from what some of them are seeing as a black hole that funds are being poured into with little of same KPI’s being hit, as more tried & trusted online marketing channels.

    In simple terms, the more traditional metrics of click-through, conversion percentages, sign-ups, etc – are being used in the same way to validate social media spend. And the numbers aren’t looking good. The challenge is for management teams to take a longer term view, as social media seems (so far) to support increased brand engagement, consumer dialogue, brand recall and deeper level customer interactions.

    It’s about extracting the value from these things, that proves more difficult to quantify, and thus more difficult put hard & fast numbers in front of people making budgetary decisions.

    My next post will look at social media, online marketing and the egaming industry, in more detail.