Marketing

The strength of marketing prowess, supported by excellent product delivery and customer support has propelled a number of our brands and products into market-leading positions.

Sustaining and also consolidating those positions requires continuous marketing support and investment. As well as continuing to innovate our product suite, we must also embrace the full range of traditional marketing tools as well as the latest methods and channels including social media, recommendation engines and mobile.

Our revenue model dictates that acquiring, retaining and reactivating customers are all central to our marketing efforts. We seek to employ a balanced approach so that we don’t become unduly exposed to any particular channel or provider. Online customer acquisition strategies include web-based advertising, affiliate programmes, referrals and search engines as well as the extensive use of a broad range of player incentives. Our offline marketing methods include advertising through mass media channels (TV, print and outdoor), direct mail, sponsorships and referrals.

Television advertising on major channels for sports betting is usually positioned around sporting events. We believe that the impact of sports betting advertising in driving customer traffic is maximised by employing a mixture of sponsorships and traditional advertising spots. bwin has a number of leading sports marketing and sponsorship agreements: in Association Football we sponsor Real Madrid and Seria B, the Italian football league; in motorsport we sponsor MotoGP and in skiing we sponsor the Hahnenkamm men’s ski race in Kitzbühel, Austria.

Additionally, we own and have developed a number of specialist land-based events and created television programming around them such as the World Poker Tour and Premier League Poker. We have more than 600 hours of branded poker programming we can use to support brand awareness and attract customers from countries around the world.

We will continue to employ a variety of sponsorship and event opportunities to continue to promote our brands and products on both an international and localised basis. Finally, player loyalty schemes are an important part of our market efforts. They have proved to be very successful with regards to retaining sports betting, poker and casino customers. In addition to our loyalty programmes, a broad range of incentives, including bonuses, are also used to attract, retain and reactive customers.