INSIGHT
FROM AFFILIATE TO PLATFORM
iGaming futurologist Mark McGuinness looks what the rise of digital passports, programmatic
marketing and custom audience targeting could mean for affiliates.
ONE OF MY historical heroes was Andy
Warhol, widely regarded as a prophet of
our time. He famously said, long before
reality television was even conceived, that
in the future everyone would be famous
for 15 minutes. Of course, he was in the
main referring to celebrities, but he really
could not have foreseen the rise of social
networks, in which everyone appears to
crave ‘infamy’ and is really only famous
for 15 second, never mind 15 minutes.
Of course this obsession, and it is an
obsession to share the most meaningless
minutiae of our everyday lives in the
new social digital economy, in the main
imparted to strangers that one is never
likely to meet (unless its online dating),
is perhaps driven by the need to be
remembered by others when we no longer
inhabit this earthly life.
It is this compulsion to ‘share’ one’s
innermost secrets online that got me to
thinking about how affiliates may need
to evolve their marketing and business
models to take advantage of what perhaps
was previously driven by anonymous
customers from web traffic. As we know,
all marketers should strive to develop buyer
personas or profiles of their prospective
customers (and I don’t mean, male, 18-35
and belonging to socio-economic group
ABC1) in order to closely match the
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iGB Affiliate Issue 48 DEC/JAN 2014/2015
needs of those potential consumers to the
brand’s products and services in the hope
of generating a sale and profit. It’s this
information which then helps to develop
the lead generation or inbound marketing
funnels for the business.
Affiliate businesses tend to rely heavily
on search engine marketing, which
although based on key word behaviour,
could be regarded as a largely anonymous
lead generation activity. As the primary
aim is to achieve a first page listing in
Google on a cost effective basis, and
funnel that traffic based on the buying
intent signal (or keyword phrase) to your
domain and then serendipitously to the
operator with the highest commissionbased offer. There isn’t perhaps an
exchange of identifiable information
between that anonymous Internet browser
and the affiliate website’s product web
pages to reveal or capture more details
during that process. Sure, a lot of affiliates
have lead generation processes in place to
capture more personal information such
as email addresses by introducing forms
for players to sign-up to receive newsletters
or offering on site competitions, and that
helps to build up a buyer profile.
So where am I going with all this? Well
the aim of the game is finding profitable
customers and hopefully lots of them. So
with the rise in ‘sharing data’, the creation
of digital passports and the growing
trend in programmatic marketing and
custom audience targeting, are affiliates
potentially losing out by having an overreliance on search engine marketing?
Programmatic marketing campaigns are
gaining adoption and are automatically
triggered and deployed according to a set
of rules applied by marketing software,
algorithms and customer data. So what
is the value of programmatic advertising
and custom audience targeting? Well for
gaming brands this form of online display
advertising allows the ability to target ads
based on your existing knowledge of your
customers, their traits and behaviours,
creating a ‘pool’ or custom audience of
look-a-like users that are interested in your
brand. Therefore, by building this custom
audience, you can use programmatic
buying to automate this and target
impressions, and retarget based on the
insights gathered on those visitors who
are more predisposed to engage with your
brand. This means the iGaming marketing
teams can define the budget, goals,
and attribution model, which adjusts
predetermined variables in real-time based
on performance, in order to deliver the
right campaign settings to achieve the
optimal return on investment.