Off the back of QiH’s recent new venture into the UK sports arena, iGB Affiliate editor Dan Kleiner speaks to CMO David Murphy about why now is the right time for a new vertical, the complexities of a US launch and why programmatic is a key part of the marketing to sales journey
David Murphy, who was brought in as CMO at QiH back in April, is keen to touch on the most recent milestone at the affiliate and white-label operator. The UK sports vertical was officially launched in the middle of August but in reality was first tested during Euros 2024.
The soft launch for the football tournament was for QiH just getting the car through first and second gear. However, with the official announcement coming in line with the Premier League’s return in August, the company now finds itself dropping officially into third gear of the vertical’s launch.
“We’re going to put significant investment into sports,” explains Murphy. “The key to why we launched a new vertical, and one I still emphasise to the team, is that there is no point just delivering volume, it's also about value.
“We could just look for short term gains and deliver a larger volume of players to operators but at the end of the day I want to build long-term relationships with them and that’s why we’ve delved into the sports area where there’s a greater lifetime value of customers.”
Power of BI
The CMO says that it wasn’t a hard sell to get the marketing team to buy into the project of launching a new vertical. “Everybody here was pretty much chomping at the bit to in some way turn the hobby into a job, as obviously they have a passionate interest in sport.”
QiH has grown over the last three years by about 75% year-on-year
Murphy is no stranger to the igaming industry, with stints at both Lottoland and Gamesys in his 15-year career on the operator side of igaming. The attraction of coming to be QiH’s first CMO is relatively simple: the affiliate’s strong growth and research.
“QiH has grown over the last three years by about 75% year-on-year,” Murphy states. The secret behind the growth can be found in its business intelligence (BI) insights.
“The BI insight we have is probably not available to any of the operators I’ve worked at for the last 15 years,” explains the won-over CMO. “The operators don’t have this level of data visualisation or the data input about value clients, which allows us to make decisions straight away.”
Once he came on board, Murphy went to work in helping map out QiH’s expansion plans which is best described as a three-fold strategy. Composed of channel development, vertical expansion and geo expansion, the plan spans almost every part of the business.
“Since I’ve been here we’ve expanded our paid social activities quite significantly,” tells Murphy on the channel development stage. “We’re delving into YouTube and programmatic marketing from September with even more plans to expand out from there.”
Venturing into the US
The vertical plans were realised through the UK sports launch, with the plans for new geos forming with an expected launch in the US with casino content in Q4.
An American customer wouldn’t be able to get their head around fractional odds and there’s challenges around the advertising copy to be able to speak to American clients
The US launch, with the familiarity of casino operations for QiH, comes with its own set of challenges for a white-label affiliate venturing outside of the UK market.
“The conversations with a customer from the UK or US are like two different conversations,” admits Murphy. “This is especially true with the way we display odds, an American customer wouldn’t be able to get their head around fractional odds and there’s challenges around the advertising copy to be able to speak to American clients.”
Advertising regulation playbook
Working across a new territory poses another question for QiH, which already balances regulation and compliance activity across the marketing activity and operator sides of its business.
“We’ve got a playbook about regulation around advertising,” explains the CMO. “It’s something we need to adhere to as we launch into the US and also have everything we have on regulation practices checked with outside compliance departments to make sure we’re following the rules in place.”
Murphy, though, is someone who’s in favour of anything that’s going to protect the customer when it comes to marketing regulation for gambling content. “I’m very aware we’re in an industry that’s a leisure pursuit and I might have a bet on the weekend on the football as much as any of our customers will.
“I know there’s other pleasure pursuits we’re competing with for that dollar of disposable income, but day-to-day it’s really important for me that people are betting as a pleasure pursuit rather than as something that they feel is a need to do so.”
Misleading last-click
While some in the industry are looking at programmatic marketing as a potential replacement for traditional media buying, Murphy thinks it’s best utilised as another tool in the customer journey.
“I’m in favour of using both as I think they serve slightly different purposes,” explains the CMO. “Platforms such as Google allow you to speak to potential customers in the first instance and then programmatic comes as bit more of a support role, a bit like how companies use billboard ads to enhance the campaign and make it more visible.”
He emphasises that there should be less noise about where the conversion comes from in deciding if one model is better than the other. “If you were to do everything on a last-click basis, it would be incredibly difficult to justify a programmatic campaign working because it’s not necessarily what it’s designed to do.
“QiH’s BI insights have also allowed us to build attribution models to understand just when somebody has been served a programmatic ad, not necessarily clicked on that ad, but how that ad contributes to their buying process,” Murphy adds.
If you were to do everything on a last-click basis, it would be incredibly difficult to justify a programmatic campaign working because it’s not necessarily what it’s designed to do
Staff expansion
Murphy arrives as part of CEO Jamie Walters’ ongoing refresh of the exec team with ‘next-gen leadership, with Sachin Saxena recently joining as CTO and Andrew Lee being promoted to COO.
And as if Murphy and the 70-strong workforce aren’t busy enough with the US, sports betting and programmatic expansions, the CMO hints that the QiH team could also nearly triple in size over the next 12 months.
Murphy’s appetite and passion for the challenges ahead is patently also shared by his team of marketers. This places them in good stead to ride out the bumps in the road that inevitably come with such a rapid scaling of the business and play their part in keeping the wider QiH business on the aggressive growth path mapped out by CEO Walters and his new senior leadership recruits.