The London Affiliate Conference 2015 went off with a bang today at the Olympia London, a new venue for the ever-growing LAC.
This is the biggest event of the year for the iGaming Affiliate industry, with almost three thousand people expected to attend over the two days its open. Running alongside the LAC is the Financial Partners Expo, the largest event dedicated to the retail finance sector, an industry with significant crossover to iGaming.
The LAC expo hall has been divided into two floors this year, the first floor featuring iGaming affiliate program booths and the second floor featuring binary and forex. Without a doubt, the first floor was the busier and more garish of the two, but there was a decent amount of activity upstairs as well.
As per usual, a good percentage of the iGaming Affiliate program booths featured free alcohol, Paddy Power with their pure Irish Guinness on tap, Caliente.mx with their lively open bar and music, 666Bet with their custom brewed 6.66% “Bullet” beer named after their new brand ambassador Roberto Carlos…you get the idea.
One of the more unique booths this year was Coral’s, where they featured a burger stand (sans burgers, unfortunately) manned by Coral TV personalities Carly and Farley. The duo appear on Coral’s TV commercials with Carly representing the type of girl all men wish they had on their arm and Farley carrying out impersonations of famous football celebs such as Harry Redknapp and “Stevie G”.
In addition to the expo, there were three session tracks taking place simultaneously during day one of LAC- “New Markets and Opportunities”, “Financial Partners Expo” and “Acquisition Zone”.
Over at the “New Markets and Opportunities” track there was a Bitcoin session during which the panelists discussed opportunities in this sector for affiliates.
Panelist Oron Barber of Coin Point is fully immersed in Bitcoin related businesses, but he thinks its a bit premature for affiliates to get involved with Bitcoin gambling companies. There are no dedicated affiliate managers or commission structures in place, he pointed out.
On the bright side Barber believes the real opportunity for affiliates in Bitcoin should becoming in the next few years and to speed the process up, the industry can start spending Bitcoin and educating the operators in the meantime.
Across the hall at the “Financial Partners Expo” there was a panel dedicated to how financial affiliates generate and manage their traffic. Panelist Chris Morton has been in the iGaming industry for years, first working for an iGaming affiliate, then as an iGaming affiliate manager and finally for the past three years as a financial affiliate.
Morton’s experience in the financial industry has been exciting, rewarding and lucrative. He shared with the crowd the benefits of a multi-focused strategy and the importance of providing value. “Users just want to know they are going to an authority site telling them these are the top [brokers]”, he said. “Try to be an industry ‘watchdog’, its good for branding”, he added.
He also suggested putting a picture of yourself on your site(s) so your traffic knows there’s a real person they can actually talk to. “I want to focus on becoming the person in between the brokers and the customers”, he said.
iGaming Industry vet Toby Oddy of Digital Fuel has also made the move towards financial betting, especially when it comes to penetrating the lucrative Chinese market. During Oddy’s presentation he covered the nuances of Chinese search engines and social media sites such as Baidu and Webo and how paid search can be a successful method for obtaining Chinese traffic.
“If your brand needs to build in China, then the Baidu network is the right choice”, he said. Baidu tracks everything and the result is a detailed profile of users so advertisers can target as they wish.
Oddy explained the biggest opportunities for affiliates and operators targeting China are as follows:
-lead generation websites
-SEM & display advert
-contextual display advertising
-branded pop & overlay advert
-RTB display advertising
-email marketing (very successful)
-social media (sponsored influencers)
Since financial betting is allowed in China (or at least it’s a grey area), its a lot easier to reach Chinese customers…and they love financial betting too. Oddy’s top tip for affiliates looking to enter this space is to be sure they understand the financial industry and that they recognize Baidu is a different beast than Google.
