Exclusive: Clive Hawkswood to chair new affiliate trade association

Former Remote Gambling Association (RGA) chief executive Clive Hawkswood will chair a new trade body for gambling affiliates operating in the UK.

The new trade body, Responsible Affiliates in Gambling (RAIG), launched today consisting of three founding members, Better Collective, Oddschecker Global Media and Racing Post.

RAIG will operate as a limited company. Hawkswood is one of four directors, alongside Oddschecker’s head of commercial Guy Harding, Racing Post digital director Cian Nugent and head of business development at Better Collective, Karl Pugh.

EGR Intel understands Oddschecker Global Media CEO Toby Bentall and Racing Post MD Mark Renshaw were the key executives behind the formation of the trade body.

RAIG applicants will go through an audit before being granted membership to ensure they are compliant with UK regulations, including ASA, CAP and BCAP rules on advertising.

Hawkswood told EGR Intel: “We are not looking to be a self-regulatory body but we wanted there to be some sort of hurdle so that we can separate the wheat from the chaff and ensure we’re on firm ground in the early days.”

The three founding members will go through the Gambling Integrity auditing process in June 2019 and the audit results will be used as a pilot to establish best practice for affiliates.

RAIG is currently in discussions with the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to ascertain wider industry concerns around affiliate advertising, before initiating its own process to raise standards.

The new association will focus solely on social responsibility to address the pressure on marketing and advertising in the UK, and to sidestep the competitive commercial nature of egaming affiliation.

Clive Hawkswood

RAIG has also been established as a UK-only trade association. On this decision, Hawkswood said: “It was an obvious early part of the discussion, but you want to walk before you can run and given the complexity of different rules in different markets, the audit process would be hugely challenging.

“Not to say never, but to begin with we are absolutely clear that this will solely focus on the UK,” he added.

The results of each audit will be analysed by the specific business under the microscope, the auditors and Hawkswood himself. Audit information will not be made available to other RAIG members.

Affiliate firms that pass the auditing process will then be able to promote the RAIG client mark on their portfolio of websites.

The ASA estimates there are around 750 gambling affiliates in the UK and all will be eligible to apply for RAIG membership, according to Hawkswood.

He said: “We are clearly not going to onboard 750 affiliates, but we are looking at the larger ones to set the tone. That will give the regulators a group they can speak to and that has been lacking.”

RAIG will offer affiliates two types of membership – full membership and associate membership. Full membership will cost an undisclosed annual rate, while associate membership will cover the cost of an audit – which EGR Intel understands to be “a few thousand a year”.

“We didn’t want to set the fees at such a level where well-meaning and well-organised affiliates who don’t have huge budgets would be priced out of the market,” added Hawkswood.

Full membership will only be made available to interested affiliates after the first 12 months. There will be no CEO, but RAIG has not ruled out hiring an individual in an executive role, depending on early interest levels.

Hawkswood decided to leave his previous role as CEO of the RGA in September last year and was replaced on an interim basis by Wes Himes.

Clive Hawkswood: “We are clearly not going to onboard 750 affiliates, but we are looking at the larger ones to set the tone.”

On his decision to join RAIG, Hawkswood told EGR: “Gambling marketing is in the crosshairs of regulators and politicians and there is a risk that bad things will happen if we are not prepared and on the front foot.

“Having been in discussions and on panels while at the RGA, it was obvious that affiliates were becoming a bit of a scapegoat for everything that was wrong in gambling marketing.

“It was too easy for everyone else to start talking about the affiliate wild west and for licensed operators to say they had no control over their affiliate partners. It is now time to counter that.”

RAIG will not be directly involved in NEWCO, the new trade body for gambling operators that will replace the RGA and Association of British Bookmakers, which is scheduled to go live in September.

Launching an affiliate association has long been a divisive issue in the egaming sector, with industry figures such as TAG Media director Tom Galanis calling for the formation of a trade body since 2017.

Galanis, who is not directly involved in RAIG, released a statement on the formation of the new trade body here.