Why are online gambling operators turning to exchange traded media?
29th July, 2009
An Exclusive interview with John Were, the Operations Director at Global Digital Markets, into why online gambling operators are adding exchange traded media to their online marketing mix. Already Global Digital Markets are working with many of the big name Casino, bingo, poker and sportsbook operators in the UK and across Europe.
Why did you set up Global Digital Markets – do you think that there is a niche in the market?
I previously worked for Jack Media, an agency specialising in direct response with a core strength in the gaming industry. Over time we saw that we were buying increasing amounts of online media through the Right Media exchange platform via a number of third parties. This led us to investigate direct membership of Right Media and other media exchanges.
Our investigations led us to believe that trading media through exchanges was the future of digital display and suggested that we could have better control of campaigns, increased efficiencies, and generate better results for our clients if we brought our exchange media buying in-house.
We had a look round the UK marketplace and saw that there were few companies specialising in exchange traded media – rather like PPC in the early days. As plans progressed with our membership of Right Media we realised that to get the best out of the seat and to enable us service a wide range of clients we should set the brokerage business up as an independent entity. GDM (Global Digital Markets) was born.
Why do you see lots of gambling clients wanting to advertise on ad exchanges?
Gambling clients are as performance focused and DR driven as they come. Exchanges offer efficiently priced media with the full range of targeting options which enables them to reach their audience, wherever they are, without paying premium prices for inventory which lead to inflated CPAs. Real-time bidding and predictive optimisation technologies allow advertisers to bid only what an ad impression is worth to them at the time which can dramatically bring down the acquisition costs associated with broad reach media.
Another major advantage of exchange bought media is that global inventory is available from a single point. There is no need to research the media landscape of Poland and establish relationships with media owners when all buying and campaign management can be done through one interface without the need to surmount language barriers at every turn.
What targeting options are there?
Targeting options vary by exchange. The largest exchanges have comprehensive options across:
geographic down to region
demographic
behavioural
contextual
day-part
channel
site-specific
Inventory can be bought on dynamic CPM, fixed CPM, CPC and CPA.
What can Gambling advertisers do to improve conversions and run a successful campaign?
The same rules apply to campaigns using exchange traded media as they do elsewhere. What the advertiser needs to remember is that a broad reach campaign may appear on 1,000s of sites and users will often be new to the product they are marketing. This means the creative and offer are extremely important.
Also, given the wealth of inventory available, data is key. Pixel-tracking is very important and allows us to optimise the campaign against all of the targeting metrics available. Decent data sets mean good numbers of conversions and advertisers need to be prepared to generate the data, often with reasonable media investment before the campaign will hit their targets and become a long-term, high volume option.
Do you gamble yourself and if so where do you play?
I don’t have as much time as I’d like to indulge my poker ambitions though my wife might disagree. I play at a number of the big name poker sites and enjoy nothing more than games with friends over a beer.
By Tom
