In profile: Ben Starr

Ben Starr, managing director of 15 Marketing and founder of OhMyBingo, talks to eGR Digital Marketing about the importance of a brand-led strategy and the changing face of online bingo affiliation

The online bingo affiliate market is arguably facing its biggest shake-up to date. The Point of Consumption (PoC) tax is now firmly in place, taking a 15% chunk from operators’ UK-derived gross profits, and the emergence of new industry giants such as Jackpotjoy-owner Intertain has changed the balance of power at the top. But for industry stalwarts like Ben Starr, it is merely history repeating itself.

Since first stepping into the egaming industry back in 2006, the 15 Marketing managing director has witnessed all the big industry trends first hand, including the move away from traditional SEO bedroom affiliates towards more brand-focused portals and a far more mature market in general. The affiliates with a strong brand identity are now rising to the top and are able to put up an admirable fight against Google’s potentially crippling Panda and Penguin updates which have caused many successful affiliate portals to collapse overnight.

During Starr’s near 10-year career, the successful affiliates have been those which have also moved away from black-and grey-hat link building, and excelling in nearly every criteria that may or may not influence search rankings. “I’m no expert in SEO but I suspect these big affiliate brands have a longer on-site time and a higher number of pages viewed per user session. Just better stickiness and a lower bounce rate,” Starr says. “A little bit of everything just helps the affiliate brand survive and a lot of non-branded ones have fallen by the wayside.”

It’s this emphasis on effective brand creation that Starr has sought to emulate with his own company 15 Marketing, a UK-based egaming marketing agency he founded in 2009, which operates the popular OhMyBingo affiliate portal and is responsible for much of the marketing behind some of the country’s most popular bingo brands. In addition to his impressive digital marketing résumé, Starr is also a founder member and shareholder in bingo software supplier Jumpman Gaming – unsurprisingly one of 15 Marketing’s biggest client contracts.

While its white label bingo solution remains its bread and butter, Jumpman also operates four B2C sites – with marketing conducted by 15 Marketing – one on the recently launched Wheel of Slots Network and three on the 15 Network. As one of the founders of the Guernsey-based gaming company, Starr has arguably led the way within the affiliate industry in successfully making the shift into B2C bingo. For all his success in the affiliate marketing space, it’s an area he should feel at home in when reviewing his curriculum vitae.

An expected journey
Starr’s life-changing online bingo calling came in 2006 courtesy of a now relatively unknown company named Herotech which was responsible for the first standalone UK bingo site, Think Bingo – a product launched on Globalcom software, which would later become Dragonfish. In July 2007 Herotech was sold to the Foxy Bingo-creator Cashcade, with the nimble Herotech crew running the marketing for the group’s standalone brands when Foxy was arguably at the peak of its popularity.

During his time at Cashcade, Starr was responsible for all marketing and affiliate activity and, prior to the firm’s sale to PartyGaming in 2009, ran the super affiliate portal with one of the most enviable domains – OnlineBingo.co.uk. It was a period Starr clearly looks back on with fond memories. “It was a great time to be at the company; it was good fun with lots of budget and exciting new ideas,” Starr reminisces. “Cheeky Bingo was really revolutionary by introducing the free bingo for real cash concept and then people like Costa Bingo followed. So we really set the bar back then.”

However, the 15 Marketing MD claims Cashcade’s sale to PartyGaming marked a difficult period for him and his team, admitting that he “personally struggled” to adapt to working with a big corporate entity with around 1,400 employees. The deal may have delivered economies of scale and benefits to the bottom line, but as key talent began leaving for pastures new so Starr did himself in December 2009, even before the highly controversial bwin/PartyGaming merger. The month of his departure, Starr founded 15 Marketing – an astute decision in hindsight.

Today his time at the agency is largely dedicated to client management. But he keeps a watchful eye on OhMyBingo which is preparing to undergo a major transformation likely to further blur the lines between affiliate and operator. The bingo affiliate’s popular free-to-play game – a feature not uncommon in the bingo affiliate world - is being prepped for a revamp complete with additional rooms, more prizes and the integration of a pay-to-play element. Starr clearly thinks this could form an integral part of the affiliate’s future success.

“That’ll be using Jumpman Gaming soſtware, so the look and feel will be very much like the 15 Network, and the pay-to-play element will be completely optional for the player who can continue playing for free, for life,” Starr explains. “For our committed users who play with us on a daily basis and have done so for years, they trust us with our reviews and come to us for advice on their choice of next bingo site. Hopefully with their feedback we can provide a service that will allow them to play safely online for real money for the first time. It’s pretty exciting.”

Finding a USP
Finding a voice in this increasingly mature and crowded market is harder than ever before. In its efforts to overcome such a hurdle, Starr claims the team at OhMyBingo is very hands on in its management style, reading every news article that’s posted, listening intently to the views of the users, holding player panels and surveys, and arranging regular meet-ups for its community to get to know each other away from the impersonal nature of the online chat room. The affiliate is not just interested in players clicking away and sending them off to an operator site but creating an online and offline environment they can find both informative and enjoyable.

“We care about them and their experience on OhMyBingo and we want them to stick around for as long as possible,” Starr emphasises. He believes such a player-centric proposition is one of the main reasons the portal sits proudly alongside the likes of WhichBingo and BingoPort as the industry’s leading affiliates in the bingo space. “I’m sure some companies would be sceptical about putting us in the same league but I think OhMyBingo is strong enough to be considered in the same category.”

The regular weekend meet-ups created and hosted by OhMyBingo are certainly a unique customer engagement proposition in egaming affiliation. The get-togethers have been running for more than four years and see its regular UK-based players meet up every year for activities including go-karting, karaoke, bowling, pool and, of course, a few drinks to chat about all things bingo. The idea behind the meet-ups is simple; to create a buzzing online community with a real sense of loyalty to OhMyBingo and increase the lifetime value of players who know when they log in they’re going to find lively chat rooms bustling with people they actually know.

It’s a part of OhMyBingo’s strategy that is close to Starr’s heart and he has no trepidation in giving something back to the portal’s community whenever logistically and financially possible. “We really do appreciate the community and the way they help with things such as chat moderation – these are the committed members of our community,” he says.

Starr is nothing if not confident the site upgrade will prove a hit with OhMyBingo’s customer base. “We’re testing the beta site now and what we’re going to provide, in our view, is a better experience for a player who’s a member of a free community than any other experience they can get at another bingo affiliate in the UK,” he says.

Business as usual
The mutually beneficial relationship OhMyBingo has with its customer database helps it keep up to speed with all the latest trends by talking with players in the chat room to ask for their advice and engaging with them on a regular basis. “I think it helps us know who we want to promote on the operator side and strike affiliate deals with; it helps us know what offers and promotions are going to work,” Starr says. “And we feed that back to Jumpman and hopefully it can tailor its promotions on its networks and know that we’ve got a group of non-incentivised hardcore bingo players giving advice.”

It’s a strategy that seems to be working for OhMyBingo at least. The site has maintained its strong market position within the sector and actually increased traffic over recent years with its decision not to buy links, and suffer from any Google penalties, seemingly paying off handsomely. From inception the affiliate site has invested much of its funds into pushing the brand forward in a way that’s both aesthetically pleasing and simple to use for customers. And there’s enough left over to advertise on television at the same time many of its competitors opted for a link-building approach instead.

OhMyBingo ran its TV advertising campaign between 2010 and 2013 and proved a phenomenal success in building an initial buzz about the brand both inside and outside industry circles. An often-cited problem with working on TV for affiliates is the obvious cost implications, in comparison to many cheaper marketing techniques, and the platform usually also forms part of a longer-term brand-building strategy. However, following the redesign and revamp of the OhMyBingo site, which has taken up most of the team’s time over the past few months, Starr says he wouldn’t rule out a return to TV advertising at some point in the future aſter the initial boost it gave the firm five years ago.

“I think in the short term we were probably crying because a jump in the rankings didn’t happen overnight and obviously television as a marketing channel is very expensive,” Starr says. “But four or five years down the line and all the people who were above us have now dropped off the radar and we’re still
around. It’s definitely paid dividends so we’re very happy about that and could look at TV again further down the line.”

Strategy for success
Despite the success of OhMyBingo, Starr has no desire to launch any additional affiliate sites for the foreseeable future. During the early stages of egaming affiliate marketing it was not uncommon for an affiliate to own dozens, and sometimes even hundreds, of portals, the majority of which are today collecting dust or no longer in existence. The lack of success from such a strategy – one of arguably short-term thinking to make a quick buck – makes Starr happy to continue focusing on the single brand affiliate approach he knows best.

“Look at some of the super affiliates out there – travel agents or a major online shop like Amazon. They don’t have a thousand shops; just one big portal that everyone goes to. We want to be the go-to destination for everything bingo,” Starr says. “A free community where we don’t have to deal with adverts to pay for anything, complete with friendship, news and some gamification where you can have fun. A little bit of everything.”

Starr admits there’s still a lot of room for improvement but in a fiercely competitive market in which profits are feeling the pinch from new taxes, he’s confident that both 15 Marketing and Jumpman Gaming can form a crucial part of pushing the industry forward. “I was part of such a fast-moving company 10 years ago and 15 Marketing is very much from the same mould,” he says. Watch this space.