GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 37 - February 2017

What are some of the differences be- tween running your own casino’s affili- ate program and managing other oper- ators’ affiliate programs? Everything! I think fewpeople comprehend the massive difference between running your own casi- no and subsequent programandmanaging a client’s. It requires you to coordinate all activities, priorities and resources, as the affiliate program is very much your sales armof the company—andwithout having a good product, promotion, positioning and communication, you have less, if anything, to sell. So everything needs to be coordinat- ed in order to get the most out of it. Why did you decide to start your own companies? Ladbrokes was my last job with another operator, and we as a fami- ly — at the time we had an 18-month-old daughter and a 3-month-old son — de- cided we wanted to move back to Swe- den. Since at the same time, most of the iGaming companies that used to be based here in Stockholm were moving abroad and putting a lot more of their operations in places like Malta, I figured the only way for me to remain in the industry was to set up my own company and consult them instead. The rest is history, and I am very humble, fortunate and glad that Ihre Consulting has grown to the extent it has. What experiences at these other firms were most important in preparing you to run your own iGaming companies? I think definitely the “helicopter perspec- tive” —making sure that before a decision or an action has been taken, you assess and account for all aspects and possible consequences. When running your own iGaming company and operations, every action has consequences and repercussions in other parts of your operation. So know- ing and being aware of the complexity of running an operation is what I learned the most, since I believe if you don’t have that, a lot of your potential profit margins go out the window. Codeta is focused specifically on live casino and table games. Why did you choose to focus on this niche? We identified this as a positioning that no Tell us a bit about Codeta’s customer base and marketing. What countries do most of your players come from? We launched in June 2016 and did so with Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and International English. Given our very strong affiliate relationships in the Nor- dic countries in particular, our existing players have primarily come from that region and Sweden in particular. How- ever, we expect this to change over time as we just launched our German site in November and expect to launch our U.K. site by the end of 2016. These two markets — the U.K. and DACH — are the ones we believe will become our core markets in Europe for the next few years: Table games and live casino have reached a different level of maturity, awareness and scale in these markets, while the Nordics remain very slots-oriented. I do believe, though, that once consumers in the Nordics become aware of the live casino product, they will come in with full force! games, because at the end of the day, it is the games that the players want to focus on and play. The site has English, Finnish, Swed- ish and Norwegian as language op- tions. Why did you decide on these languages, and do you have any plans to expand to other languages in the near future? We have just added Ger- man. We decided on those languages since we have the best knowledge about those geo-markets and have the strongest affiliate relationships in them. Also, we felt like the most picky consumers one could have are probably Nordic ones — so if you do things right there, you are most likely geared to take on other parts of the world! Describe your role in regard to affili- ates. Howmuch of your traffic is attrib- utable to affiliates? Our initial marketing strategy is very much based on affiliates; once we gain traction in a market, we initi- When running your own iGaming company and operations, every action has consequences and repercussions in other parts of your operation. one on the B2C-side of our business had taken ownership of. No particular brand is associated fully with the product or this segment of the market. There is no clear owner of it as you would find in products such as poker (PokerStars) or sports (bet365). In our research phase, we also found out a lot about our target group — table games players — and noticed that this was a group of players that were in particular unhappy with their experiences on existing sites and felt they were not being taken seriously by the operators. How does Codeta appeal to them? I think customers appreciate our sleek design and that they do get the sense of the brand instantly and our positioning as a table games casino. The agency that designed and built the website partic- ipated actively in all the focus groups, quantitative and qualitative studies, and interviews that we did with players. So they built the site with much of that feed- back in mind. I think players appreciate that we put the games first at Codeta. We don’t hammer players with promotions or cross-sell messages. We focus on the w w w . g p w a t i m e s . o r g 69