Q&A: Matt Booth, 32Red commercial director

32Red yesterday announced a three-year sponsorship deal with iconic Scottish football club Rangers. 32Red commercial director Matt Booth took some time out to talk to eGaming Review about the agreement and his recent return to the operator following a six-year stint at Betfair.

eGaming Review (eGR): You recently returned to 32Red after spending almost six years at Betfair. Why did you decide to return?

Matt Booth (MB): Having spent six great years at Betfair I felt that I was ready for a move so I decided to see what opportunities there were inside and outside of the betting industry. I spoke to a number of betting firms who will remain nameless and also had a number of conversations with comparethemarket, but the challenge to return to 32Red felt right. I knew they had a strong management team and Ed Ware is a motivating person to work for.

The opportunity at 32Red is huge. We have a great brand and customer experience, we just need to make sure more people are aware about us and convince them to come and try us. Five months in I know I made the right choice.

eGR: How will your experience at Betfair benefit you with the task in hand at 32Red?

MB: Betfair gave me the opportunity to develop as a commercial and marketing professional. When I arrived at Betfair we didn’t know enough about our customers, their needs, motivations and behaviours. During the six years we built current and future value models, developed algorithms to help identify where players were in the player lifecycle, and recommendation engines to suggest what marketing activity we should be doing to improve customer loyalty.

We are very close to introducing these models to 32Red. Automation and modelling will help us become even more personalised, which will lead to a deeper understanding of our player needs and help improve loyalty. Our ultimate goal is to move to a predictive-driven marketing position.

I was also exposed to big budget advertising. We had lofty growth targets at Betfair and we quickly learnt the most effective new player acquisition routes. Understanding the mix between offline (TV & sponsorship) and digital (PPC, search, display and more recently social) is crucial to drive efficiency in your marketing spend. Six years of continual campaign optimisation will help me ensure that we are spending our marketing money as efficiently as we can at 32Red.

eGR: Can you tell us a little bit about the recent deal with Mi Media? How will this benefit 32Red’s marketing strategy?

MB: Mi Media will help us understand how to best reach our target audience and recommend the right mix of spend to grow our revenues in an efficient way. We have built analytics that allows us to flex our marketing spend, and we are optimising our media spend down to the spot level on TV. We are in the process of expanding our analytics to understand the impact our external advertising has on our existing customer marketing.

Many business solely judge the marketing ROI against new players, which I believe underplays the value of offline marketing communications. The work we are undertaking with Mi Media will bring together response, behavioural and research data to allow us to make better marketing spend decisions.

eGR: 32Red is, in the main, a casino operator. Does this mean you’ll be laying low during the World Cup marketing battle?

MB: We will let the others fight over the big media deals in June and July. Having been involved in a couple of Channel 4 media auctions and negotiations with Sky on annual advertising deals, I know how competitive these processes are. I suggest the ITV bidding process for the World Cup packages was as equally competitive. These new ways of buying media means many brands are over paying for these rights, just to make sure competitors don’t have them. All the modelling in the world will tell you that’s not efficient.

Our focus during the World Cup period will be on our existing players. We will develop marketing campaigns to reward our current players for their loyalty. What would have been external media spend to drive new player recruitment in this period would have been wasted spend as we would be unlikely to generate the same response levels, so we have made the decision to invest in our base.

eGR: Can you tell us a little about the recently announced deal with Rangers FC?

MB: It is a three-year deal with various different performance elements in the deal which will mean we pay more if Rangers perform. Our hope is that Rangers win the Championship next year and that they return to top flight football in Scotland and eventually qualify for Europe. It would be great to see the Old Firm derby back in British football and to be on the front of Rangers shirts when they return to the SPL, this can only be good for raising the awareness of the 32Red brand.

We were surprised after yesterday’s announcement about the level of interest in the deal. They are the fifth best supported club in the UK, and 16^th in Europe, so there is a thirst for Rangers news and the national press in Scotland dedicate four pages every day to football.

The deal gives us a tremendous amount of exposure in the stadium and we have a number of great unique assets to leverage during the three-year term. We also have extensive digital rights as well as social media access, which will hopefully allow us the opportunity to build a great relationship with the supporters of the club.

eGR: Can we expect to see further similarly high-profile sponsorship deals in the coming months?

MB: We understand the role that sponsorship plays for us as a brand that needs to continually position our name in front of the gambling audience. We sponsor more horse races than any other betting brand in the UK. We have partnerships with ITV to exploit the rights of their I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here brand.

We are sponsors of Late Night Film on Film4. We sponsored the Paul O’Grady show at the back end of 2013. We are partners with Bologna in Italy. Plus, now we have the Rangers FC partnership. We are always on the search for good value sponsorship deals. We are in the process of discussing some exciting new partnerships that I am sure we will be able to announce soon.