Q&A: Tom Waters, GVC Holdings

The poor health of the global poker market continues to cause headaches for operators looking to arrest decline and drive growth. The challenging conditions have seen many overhaul their ecologies and rewards schemes in a bid to target more casual players.

Tom Waters, head of partypoker and Cashcade labels at GVC Holdings, says the firm has taken a “lite” approach to date but with more changes planned for the coming months.

Speaking to EGR, Waters explains how he intends to breathe life back into the vertical and plans for Cashcade’s Foxy Casino brand.

eGaming Review (EGR): How do you see the poker market at present? And what do you make of Amaya’s decision to migrate Full Tilt onto the PokerStars platform?

Tom Waters (TW): The poker market is tougher than ever. PokerStars is as dominant as they have ever been, we are trying to make a comeback, then you have 888 which has strengthened a lot over the past few years, while iPoker is eating away at the bottom. So there are a few big players going at each other and no one wants to give away any ground, so it is highly competitive.

What Amaya has done with PokerStars and Full Tilt is really interesting. Nobody is quite sure what is going to happen. It’s also unclear where their players will decide to go once the migration has taken place. In my view, all poker players like to have a second site to PokerStars and in the past I think a lot of them have used Full Tilt.

Now they [customers] will need to make the decision on whether they consolidate all of their play on PokerStars, or pick partypoker or 888 or someone else. So overall it is tough and it is a challenge, but we are relishing it.

EGR: Does the migration present an opportunity for partypoker to claw back some share from PokerStars and Full Tilt? Will you look to ramp up marketing spend?

TW: We are not going to go and specifically target Full Tilt players. I would like to think that what we are doing in the market at the moment with our festivals and the promotions we are running are enough to entice these players across anyway. If not, there is probably a reason why they are not playing with us at the moment and we will need to make some more changes to figure out why and how to entice them. We have a marketing plan for H1 that we will continue to follow and other market conditions are not going to dictate what we do.

EGR: What are you doing to breathe life back into partypoker?

TW: It took a while to work out where the flaws were in the business and where we have previously gone wrong. The first kiss of life came last year with the launch of the Power Series; we realised our tournament schedule was not optimised and had become a little bit fragmented over time. So we completely reviewed it, refreshed it, and started again.

The other, and probably most important thing, was the live experience we ran in 2015 through our partnership with Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham. It allows us to offer live poker to thousands not just a few, as was the case with our World Poker Tour partnership, and the low buy-ins appeal to a much larger percentage of our database.

EGR: How has Foxy Casino been performing? Are you seeing much cross-fertilisation between the Foxy Bingo and Casino brands?

TW: Foxy Casino was kind of a soft-launch to begin with. There was a campaign, but we didn’t go wild. It was essentially a repackaged bingo campaign that we repurposed. We were using 2015 as a bit of a playground to get the product right and create some traction in the market. We have now launched a dedicated TV campaign for Foxy Casino, which is being picked up and noticed.

And we are seeing really positive results with good new player volumes coming through. To be honest, though, the challenge for Foxy Casino is that it needs to find its own identity. It is both advantaged and disadvantaged by its closeness to the Foxy Bingo brand – do people exclusively associate Foxy with bingo making it difficult then to acquire casino players directly?

EGR: So how do you plan to move Foxy Casino away from Foxy Bingo?

TW: Our challenge is to find a niche for Foxy Casino and give it its own identity in the marketplace away from Foxy Bingo and we are hoping our new TV campaign will do that. We will also look at the design and structure of the website, the product, the way the messaging goes out. We are trying to move away from the traditional Foxy Bingo approach and create more of a classy casino. The product is great and we have a good campaign, so in theory there is no reason why it can’t build its own personality. The brand identity needs to evolve over time.