Why you need to get all your acquisition ducks in a row

Gambling operators should desist from having affiliate departments. I realise this is a bold statement coming from an affiliate whose relationships are, to a large extent, built on the relationship with various affiliate departments. However, I feel I am entirely justified with this controversial claim for a number of reasons, which I would like to explain.

I would first like to take you back to the days when I served as country manager for Betfair. I was put in charge to grow revenues from the Swedish market. I took one look at the numbers and quickly realised that a large chunk of acquisitions and revenue came from affiliation. As with almost all bigger operators, Betfair had a centralised affiliate department. My conclusion, however, was that if I was to be in charge of the P&L of Sweden, I needed to control all aspects of what makes me hit or miss the targets. Hence, I pitched the very controversial idea to my manager to get a local resource to look out for Sweden in particular.

Luckily for me, I had a very good and progressive manager, so he conceded to this idea. A Swedish affiliate manager was recruited and put in the Swedish marketing team. Several eyebrows were raised and it wasn’t always easy for him to get acceptance in the central team where he was regarded as something of an oddity and, to some, I would say even a threat.

Nevertheless, he was parachuted behind the lines of the oil rich country of affiliation with only a few contact details to rendez-vous by. In a very short time, he knew everyone worth knowing on the affiliate side. From there, after a short time outside the industry, he went on to play an absolutely decisive role in building a very successful operator that today is a publicly-traded company.

A new way of thinking

After two-and-a-half years at Catena Media, I wish more operators would have adopted this way of working with affiliation and structured their operation accordingly. We have a truly great relationship with the fine men and women who make up the affiliate departments of their operators. However, they are still internally seen as the black ops of their companies.

I am not saying that an investment into TV is not essential for an operator, but it is not more or less essential than investing in affiliation – it is just another channel to grow your business and used at different stages for different things.

To illustrate this statement, I again take you back in time to about two years ago when a good friend of mine declared that he was going to launch a new casino operator. Unfortunately, he told me that they would have a strict no affiliation policy. Less than a year later, I get a call from the same friend asking for a meeting. The paid efforts had not helped them with their launch and they were now re-thinking their no affiliation policy. We struck a deal and today his operator is a top performer with Catena Media and his company is absolutely flying.

This affiliate-operator relationship is absolutely ridden with legacy. I would urge every leader at a gambling operator reading this sitting to reconsider how they structure their organisation. It is high time to bring the affiliate managers in from the cold and make them a part of the rest of the acquisition team. Don’t kill the affiliate manager, but kill the affiliate department.

Today Catena Media offers SEO traffic, PPC, programmatic and email, and an affiliate manager with little or no paid budget or understanding of these products can’t help us help you. If he or she was instead a part of the acquisition department, then we could easily be handed over to the colleague overseeing PPC. Country managers, take control of all aspects of your P&L.

Klas Winberg has worked in online gaming since 2004 for operators such as Expekt and Betfair. In 2016 he joined Catena Media as it was going public in Stockholm. He now works as VP of sales & marketing. Today, Catena Media has 300 staff around the world and is traded on the Stockholm Mid Cap list.