We’ve just wrapped up the London Affiliate Conference, the largest event of the year dedicated to iGaming affiliate marketing,a segment of the industry that is more competitive now than ever.
While I was roaming the floors of the LAC, I spent some time with my good friends Charles Gillespie and Roberto Savio of KAX Media, two well-known faces in the industry with a new project up their sleeve designed to give affiliates a competitive edge.
As an affiliate, manually gathering statistics from a number of affiliate programs at the end of each month is a real pain, something I can relate to from my time with Casino City. Keeping on top of tracking, revenue and other numbers are of upmost importance to any affiliate in the business, so there’s no way to avoid the dreaded monthly stats collection…but now there is a way to simplify it immensely.
Gillespie, Savio, and their team have spent the past eighteen months developing Adge, a system automatically unifying an affiliate’s statistics from each program they work with. Adge can be described as “a passion project” for KAX Media because they know from experience how much time it takes to gather statistics manually. Now that they’ve developed Adge, stats can be accessed automatically every day and viewed anytime on desktop or mobile devices.Literally a dream come true for KAX and other iGaming affiliates.
Savio is the Sales and Marketing Director of Adge and is incredibly passionate about the product. During our interview, Savio explained his background in iGaming, where the idea for Adge came about, why it can greatly simplify the life of all iGaming Affiliates, and how this product compares to some of its competitors.
Becky Liggero: Thank you so much for joining me today, Roberto. Let’s start with your background in the gaming industry, tell us about it.
Roberto Savio: I have a back ground as Sales Director for Dell Computer before I was dragged into the gambling industry more than 10 years ago. I have had several roles over the years, such as Sales & Marketing Director, VP sales and CEO. I also act as member of the board in several companies.
I have had the opportunity to work in great companies, such as TAIN AB, Cake Network, Bally Technologies, IQballz, and now Adge. The gambling industry is a quick moving industry and it’s constantly changing. I love the dynamics and the creative people and even though I tried to move out of the industry a few times, it kept dragging me back in. So I’m aiming for the next 10 years now.
BL: Ah, you’re an iGaming lifer then, just like me. So what made you decide to join the KAX Media Group and start taking charge of Adge?
RS: The opportunity to do something truly innovative, working with a product that solves an actual huge problem within the industry.
The gaming industry is a wonderful place to work and has been on the forefront of technology for many years. That, sadly, has changed and in many ways the gaming industry is behind the rest of the ecommerce and technology world. Every day you see more “me too” casinos and affiliate programs popping up. The industry seems happy to just keep churning out more of the same old affiliate sites and online casinos.
While it is great that the industry is continuing to grow, I wanted to participate in a project that was doing something unique and innovative.
The opportunity to revolutionize the productivity of tens of thousands of gaming affiliates excited me. If you do a back of an envelope calculation for how much time affiliates have spent checking and updating their stats, the numbers are staggering. Say, conservatively, 25,000 affiliates spend 1 day a month for an average of 5 years checking their stats. That’s 1.5m business days. Or assuming 252 business days per year, 5,952 man years of work. Ridiculous.
I’ve also known the KAX Media Chief Executive Charles Gillespie since 2007. We started talking about collaborating on Adge while the product was still in development. I’ve watched him turnaround the KAX business after their exit from China in 2008 through to the acquisition of Gambling.com in 2011 and winning the eGamingReview Gaming Affiliate award last November.
He’s put a great team together and it has been great to learn the affiliate side of the business from one of the industry’s most successful people.
BL: Agreed on Charles, I remember when he exited his company from China and admire how he was able to build everything back up.Can you go into more detail on whyAdge really is “a dream come true” for iGaming affiliates?
RS: If you need to track the ROI of various traffic sources end to end, there really were no options until now. Adge can do this and will let you run a report on each of these groups.
For example, KAX Media use this technology to track SEO referrals from various Google sites and also different PPC keywords. The end result is an accurate ranking of conversion rates and player values according to each of these sources that pulls in data from over 50 different operators, automatically generated every day. This was a dream come true for KAX Media.
BL: Sounds like it. Describe the size and type of gaming affiliate Adge is best suited for.
RS: The affiliates that will gain the most productivity from Adge will be the ones that have the most affiliate accounts. Some affiliates have over 1,000 accounts and they would certainly see the most benefits.
That said, affiliates starting out benefit greatly by setting up their accounts the right way in the Adge system from the word go. This means they will never have to login to any affiliate reporting system to check stats.
BL: I can relate to this because of my time with Casino City…I always dreaded the end of the month because it meant“stats time”. I would have loved access to a platform like Adge back then. So who are your main competitors and how does Adge compare to what’s already out there?
RS: There is StatsRemote which a lot of gaming affiliates use. KAX Media tried using statsremote and gave up after a week. It’s built with generations old technology and was not accurate enough and too frustrating to use. KAX needed the gaming specific fields like New Depositing Players, Rake, Deposits, Withdrawals, etc. These things just don’t exist in stat trackers targeted at general ecommerce. That is why KAX purpose built Adge as a dedicated platform for gaming statistics.
BL: I tried StatsRemote when I was with Casino City and it certainly was clunky and unreliable. Sounds like you have a fantastic product there, Roberto and we look forward to learning more about it at the iGaming Super Show in May. Thank you so much for joining me today.
