The second half of January is traditionally bursting with PRs of new products and innovation in the gambling industry in anticipation of ICE London and LAC, two events that together cover the entire gaming and iGaming affiliate industry. Enter a fresh release from Carousel Group announcing the imminent launch of their two coveted brand-names in the form of tier-1 global betting sites, SportsBetting.com and RaceBook.com.
After chatting with Carousel Group Founder and CEO Daniel Graetzer, we learned the affiliate program for these two brands was revealed at SiGMA 2018 and has already caught the interest of a number of affiliates. This should come as no surprise considering the quality of the URLs and the solid five-year business plan Graetzer and his team have nailed down.
“Obviously we’ve managed to acquire some pretty killer brand names as you can see”, Graetzer was happy to share with CalvinAyre.com.
“We’ve been working with a really strong branding agency called RCA out of the UK and we’ve been trying to inject a lot of personality into the brands, so they’re not just a generic website, they’re not a portal website, not a place you just go to get information. They’re places that live and breathe sports betting and racing, they’re for enthusiasts they’re for serious punters, they’re for the casual punter as well”, he said.
At the end of last year, Carousel Group completed the acquisition of their proprietary software, a strategic decision Graetzer made despite his respect for the outstanding B2B sports betting software providers in our space.
“We’re going into a saturated marketspace and we have generic brand names so the worst thing we could do is go to market with a product that is just like the guy next to us”, explained Graetzer.
“There’s a lot of specific things that we want, its in our DNA to be different, to be innovative and really the only way to get that across through our product is to own it, is to really take advantage of proprietary software”, he added.
Graetzer was willing to invest a lot of money in the technology powering Carousel’s brands, a platform that will provide the foundation for the team’s aggressive five-year plan.
“We’re not here to sell the business overnight, we’re not looking for an exit strategy. We will be here long term, we’re looking for a long term revenue play, so really owning our destiny was so important to us, owning the brands, owning the platform and trying to get really good people. You combine them with good technology and a good brand and hopefully some magic will come out of it”, he said.
In addition to building the best platform to suit their needs, Carousel is committed to having a good commercial presence and remaining compliant, one of the many reasons why Graetzer chose to license his brands in Malta.
“In the past I’ve worked with some brands launching in Malta and the process is relatively easy, its straight forward. The MGA and the government there are doing fantastic things by trying to focus on having a good reputation in the marketplace and now its losing its status as a tax haven, as place where you go to get around the law, you actually go there to focus on being a good international business” he explained.
“We looked at a number of the other options in the market, your Gibraltars, your Isle of Mans, your Curacaos and none of them really share all of the things that we want to do in terms of reputation, ease of business, Brexit concerns and at the end of the day it just made the most sense to start the business [in Malta]”, he added.
But it certainly does not end there. Graetzer’s long term plan includes obtaining licenses in other markets and expanding the brands’ reach to a global level, including the UK, US, Sweden and Brazil.
“We have this vision in our business of being global minded but very local in the sense of operations…we will expand by developing localized teams across Europe and Latin America because its really important to be close on the ground to customers”, explained Graetzer.
“We will have local teams, but we’ll be running it with a sense that our business is global, we’re targeting many regions, many countries, many currencies, many languages, it is a real challenge to balance both the global view and the local operations but that’s our strategy and we’ll see how things play out over this year”, he added.
