betonliamcasey

Category: Brands

  • Ten betting & gaming industry predictions for the next 3+ years.

    I wrote a post nearly 5 years ago that gave some predictions around some of the areas where there would be growth in the betting & gaming industry.

    The summary from 5 years ago?

    • Operators would need to focus on real-time delivery of a data-based customer experience.
    • That there would be a huge focus on Operators focusing on the addition of more & more markets.
    • That “branded” content would be key to the growth in the egaming space.
    • That there would a struggle to harness Social properly.

    I’ll let you, the reader decide if those predictions were on the money or not…comments welcome.

    So – what does the future hold?

    It’d be too easy to predict further super-mergers, or a loosening up of the regulatory regime in the USA, instead I’m going to focus on some more esoteric and/or short / medium & long term outcomes I predict.

    Short-term (12 months):

    • William Hill & Amaya deal to huff & puff for a relatively short period – but ultimately a deal that doesn’t get done. (Too much grey market exposure for WH. Kentucky lawsuit still hanging over Amaya. Technology integration being a barrier.)
    • PokerStars to announce that they are moving to NYX / OpenBet as their core sportsbetting platform.
    • Fortuna Entertainment Group to gobble up market share on the back of their Playtech deal. (Only if they have the in-house capability & experience to execute though…).

    Medium Term (12 – 36 months):

    • Trading floors (and direct trading of sports volume) to be wound down by many online gambling operators and customer volume to be run through managed trading solutions from 3rd parties. {Trading is a) volatile and material to bottom line results b) expensive & requires highly paid trading floors and c) pricing is getting commoditised as Operators compete with a race to the bottom around “Best Price Guaranteed”.} Offerings like 3ET to disrupt the market. (Ed note: I have done some consultancy work for 3ET.)
    • Skybet to IPO. Their recent results are a clear indication of that. And they are owned by a private equity firm (CVC) that will want to cash out.
    • Matchbook.com to emerge from “mid-tier” Exchange status and start to challenge market leaders via industry leading tech & customer experience (Ed note: I have done some consultancy work for Matchbook).
    • Companies that understand the importance of full vertical integration in the online gambling space will start to dominate across regional markets. (Vertical integration = own the traffic via owning affiliates, own the brands that you send the traffic to, own the software & IP that sits behind the brand, own the payment processing.) Optimizer Invest are probably the best example here.
    • Big national brands that have attempted to build regional profit centres around their core brand – will potentially move to more local facing brands. Paddy Power’s experience with Sportsbet is an excellent example. Betsson Group’s multi-brand strategy will pay off in the long term too.

    Long Term (36 months+):

    • Blockchain to directly contribute to regulation in the online gambling space. (Who needs regulators when you’ve got a globally recognised standard of financial record? There’s a good piece that explains it here.)
    • AI & chatbots to start doing much of the heavy-lifting around basic customer interactions in the betting & gaming space – this reducing pretty large cost-bases (and OPEX) from companies. It’ll take at least this long for current technology to transition to these capabilities.

    What do you think about these predictions? On track? Way off beam? What am I missing?

    If you need to know more about me – you can find out here.

  • The importance of Brand Advocates (Infographic)

    Marketers have to realise that in the modern marketing paradigm that they no longer control the conversation.

    At best, marketers have to provide a framework whereby they can curate customer-focused interactions, measure the responses, and then optimise their brands for improved interactions & results.

    One of the most important areas to support has to the development of Brand Advocates.

    And, in my experience – Brand Advocates can be the difference between you understanding what are the parts of your brand proposition that the consumer truly values – VS a weak feedback loop whereby you can be feeling around in the dark to make changes that you may never know (if you are not data-driven enough) how impactful they are.

    I came across this infographic today – and thought it broke this area down well. Some good data there too.

    Brand Advocates infographic

  • Marketing as Science or Art. Which are you?

    Saw this today. Thought it was a good summary of the paradigm shift to data-driven marketing VS the ever-present need for engaging with customers on an emotional level.

    If you don’t have the right blend of both – you need to get working on it fast…

    Marketing-Scientists-vs-Marketing-Artists

  • 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.

  • Canadian media does in-depth profile on elusive Pokerstars founder

    The Canadian broadsheet “The Globe and Mail” has put together a piece on the founder of Pokerstars, Isai Scheinberg. It’s not particularly in-depth, but the the fact that they’ve managed to find out much at all, shows the level of mainstream media interest in the current Poker case.

    The Globe and Mail compares the Scheinberg family to the Bronfmans, a Montreal clan (Scheinberg is variously described as Canadian or Israeli-Canadian) who famously turned U.S. Prohibition laws into a billion-dollar business.

    Some of the interesting facts included were that Isai placed 25th at a Texas Hold’em tournament at the 1996 World Series of Poker, and that he was involved with IBM, where he helped develop the Unicode standard. (Probably a great background, for the network development side of Poker, I’d say.)

    The article notes that he founded Rational Entertainment in 2001, which is effectively the company that’s responsible for the network & software development for Pokerstars.

    One thing that tends not to be mentioned in a lot of these stories is how the online poker companies should be held up as marketing icons, in the way that they’ve built solid, global brands inside a decade (some even shorter) and that their ability to manage the consumer life-cycle is virtually unsurpassed. You don’t build billion dollar businesses by sitting on your ass, that’s for sure.

    Their EPT purchase was a great move in terms of shoring up the offline poker branding market, with high-end TV production values (thanks to John Duthie), and a structure which means that they can get events into profit, even before a frame is shot. (Just take a look at the number of online EPT event qualifiers that Pokerstars run, all at a low buy-in, but their liquidity ensures biiiiig numbers.)

    The media and the US legal system may be out to get a big piece of Mr. Scheinberg and his family, but I’d give plenty of kudos to a someone who’s harnessed the power of popular culture, networks, branding and good old-fashioned chutzpah.

    Full Globe and Mail piece here.

  • My take on the Full Tilt / PokerStars / Absolute Poker ban for US players.

    If Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker (in particular) weren’t so focused on world domination, and trying to one-up each other in terms of player volumes, I think that the events of Friday the 15th of April may not have happened.

    Why?

    In the race to keep maintaining player deposits from US customers, and given that credit cards are not an option, (particuarly for new customers), ACH transactions became much more important. ACH transactions are bank transfers where the player gives their bank details to the gaming company, and a transfer is inititiated through a payment processor, from the bank, to the player’s gaming account.

    Why was this important and how did it impact on Full Tilt, Pokerstars and Ultimate Bet?

    It became important because it allowed these companies to bypass credit card blocks, as the system that’s set up to monitor bank transfer payment types (in the ACH system) isn’t as robust as what the credit card companies have available. It’s also a system that requires a lot more monitoring, but is much more fragmented as (in the US) it is populated by the diaspora of small, local US banks.

    The banking system in itself in the US is a lot more fragmented than in other parts of the world. This means that  you’d need to have checks & balances in place, at a local level at every single bank that has the ability to send or receive funds from/to any 3rd party. Currently, the US banking system (and individual banks) conduct due diligence into the business of any merchant when the account is opened, but if the nature of that business changes (ie: from buying & selling coffee and having 1000’s of individual transactions from individuals buying coffee > overnight 10,000+ transactions which may or may not be related to online gaming) , the bank don’t necessarily have the resources (or the interest) to look deeper into it. Also, let’s face it, fees are now being generated on the 10,000+ transactions. Money talks.

    Now, if you are a big enough online gambling business, and have:

    a) enough cash at your disposal to buy a bank

    b) difficulty in getting payments from US players

    …why not buy a bank, where you can set up as many merchant accounts as you like – to process as many transactions as possible? Or, at least buy the companies/people that can do that for you?

    That’s what these guys did – and it came back to bite them on the ass. When one of their payment processors (a middle man) got caught, it looks like that in exchange for doing a deal with the DoJ in the New York – he reverse engineered a lot of the transactions and the money trail – thus allowing the DoJ to work out who was getting money from where, and where was it ending up.

    Read about Daniel Tzvetkoff’s story here.

    How does it impact on the companies indicted?

    If you combine that fact that it’s relatively easy to take a guess about the player volumes (and therefore revenues) that are being generated at these sites, because of poker aggregating sites like Poker Scout – and the feds could now reverse engineer the money trail due to Tzvetkoff. A perfect opportunity was presented to allow the DoJ to indict the owners of the largest online gambling companies out there. The Full Tilt owners (in particular) probably didn’t need to flaunt their market position so openly – three words. Red rag, bull.

    Personally, I think that it’s a perfect storm for these companies only. They’ve backed themselves into a corner with payment processing, market share and profile.

    My take?

    US players that have money on PS / FTP / UB are probably trying to get their EU based buddies to log into their accounts and chip dump to other EU accounts so that they can get their money out. Alternatively, if they want to get their cash, they’ll ned to relocate outside of the US. Otherwise, they are in for a long wait for their cash.

    Interesting times for the industry. I’d bet they’ll get more interesting.

    NB: it might slow up (in some cases) some recruitment – as people wait to see if there’s fallout (ie: good people) from the biggest companies in the space. It may actually accelerate it in other companies – as those at certain companies jump ship (wrongly) as a knee jerk reaction to this. My take? Wait and see. The sky’s not falling in, and in a month’s time, it’ll be business as usual for most people.

  • My crystal ball for Facebook advertising is working well.

    World domination is ongoing, law suits are pending and one of my Facebook predictions for marketers is coming true.

    I predicted that the cost of advertising on Facebook would rise (it’s up 40% in the last year) but that click through rates would drop. Ergo, it’s not a great destination for seriously bottom line focused marketers, companies and brands. See a few of my social media predictions – here.

    The anecdotal evidence that we’ve heard and seen from partners and competitors is that the return on investment for companies looking to use it as an aquisition tool for paying customers, is one word, crap.

    We do a lot of deals with portals, ad networks and other online destinations. Conversion rates can be anything from .5% to 5% depending on whether the site that our ad is appearing on is targeted (to our segment) or untargetd (maybe just sports, but no gambling). We’ve heard of 5 figure campaigns run with response and ultimate conversion rates of less than .001%. Ouch.

    Twitter’s growth is unabated, and it seems to have beaten Facebook to the punch on click through rate – but part of that is due to the nature of the medium (of the tweet). To have any engagement, you HAVE to click through a tweet to see more in-depth content – this is primarily due to the URL shorteners out there.

    Some of the feedback that we’ve had from customers is that when they are on Facebook, they are in friend-browsing mode and even less likely than usual to engage with random marketing, however targeted. It’s a little different when they are surfing outside of a social network. They are more open to suggestion.

    There’s a good piece on it here from last year, and that was before Facebook’s prices went up. Read it here.

  • Blogiscpline – The discipline of Blogging

    Tipping point, friendquest, repurposing, and my current personal favourite – aquadextrous (the ability to turn off taps in the bath with both feet) may all be considered part of the current lexicon of buzzwords, to which I want to add my own – “blogiscpline”.

    It’s the discipline of blogging.

    I originally started this blog as a way to allow me to put down some thoughts on the area that I work in (online gaming), outside the headspace confines of what area of work that I have to think about today. Hmmmm, that was about 4 months ago, and I haven’t written anything since. Go figure.

    I’m either a) too indisciplined to keep up with what I started (this blog) b) too busy to get the headspace to do it c) not engaged enough by the idea of putting down my thoughts on paper d) none or all of the above :-).

    I think that different people have different ideas about what is the discipline required to maintain an active and engaging blog. Simply updating something every day, may be of benefit to allow an individual to feel like they are achieving something – but then you come up against the argument of quantity VS quality. Is something that’s updated regularly but only carries incrementally interesting updates – of more value than a blog that’s updated less regularly, but those updates are much more interesting or relevant to the reader?

    This is where blogiscpline becomes interesting. Is the discipline of blogging about focusing on regular, incremental updates – making sure to be disciplined about updating your blog or…

    …is it more important to be disciplined about the content of your blog? Should you hold off on blog updates for the sake of them VS updating when you’re sure that you’ve got something relevent and engaging to say?

    Maybe I should stop right now then…

    Gaming Tip: I think that PartyGaming are turning a corner. They’ve just bought a good Racebook, and it looks like to me that they’ve finally got a good enough product mix to compete on the same playing field as the “proper” multi-product gaming operators. I think that they are worth holding in the medium term – purely to see if UIGEA might open up an exemption for Poker.

    I’ve goto some more thoughts on what is the right product mix for online gaming operators, but I’m going to have to aplly some decent blogiscpline to share them with you.