SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
With the iGaming Super Show revealing today that it has grown the B2B side of the event, SBC’s affiliate correspondent Marc Pedersen recounts his experience from an affiliate and media partner perspective.
One of the interesting developments from the Igaming Super Show in Amsterdam last month was the emergence of lots of new brands showing off their services at the RAI, far more than usual in fact. It was good to see new blood being represented at the show, although it was noticeable that the stalwarts, the firms who would normally have a booth at this event, were no longer featured on the floorplan.
What was also noticeable was the drop in visibility of binary options brands as well. Has the product already fallen out of favour with the market? Maybe it just caters for a radically different demographic than those that enjoy sports bettting.
Still it did open the floor for some exciting new bookmakers, noticeably 666Bet who even brought brand ambassador and QPR manager Harry Redknapp over to meet delegates and use his effusive charm on them. It was certainly a way of making a statement by the new betting brand. Job done, I would think.
One exhibitor that I did feel sorry for was ISIS Friends, who had a very large booth at the show. Sometime real world events can really put a spanner in marketing plans and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. So the emergence in Iraq of the terrorist organisation ISIS, along with the blanket media coverage that came with it, was utter bad luck as far as the company is concerned.
The challenge this proposes to any marketer is whether to stick their current brand and hope that the terrorist group disappears from view, stick with the current brand in the view that it will receive no negative connotations in the igaming world, or change the brand that they have spent time building up. It’s a tough call to make. Fortunately with ISIS already trying to rebrand to just IS, it could be possible to ride this one out.
As was, no doubt, holding the event during the World Cup. It seemed a strange strategy given that many of the affiliates would have had to miss out on attending this year in order to concentrate on the world’s biggest football tournament.
But the biggest problem was that there was still a lack of creativity on the stands, which is the same problem that beset the London Affiliate Conference as well. While William Hill tried something a little out of the ordinary, with a samba band on the stand invoking the World Cup, it wasn’t particularly successful. Thank heavens that the industry is not as staid as some of the current marketing techniques on show.
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Marc Pedersen – Head of Sales Better Collective & bettingexpert.com
