Building on a strong footprint in Brazil remains a key priority for global marketing agency bwise Media, but it also has eyes firmly set on emerging and ‘freshly’ regulated gambling markets across the world.
bwise Media delivers igaming advertisers with highly targeted inventory on the most relevant sports platforms and social channels, but also owns a collection of its own SEO-focused sports betting and casino review sites.
“Our role is helping the most renowned global operators – for sports betting, gaming, esports as well as crypto – getting their promotions in front of the right premium organic audience,” said Sebastian Paris, COO at bwise Media.
“It’s very important that we offer various services across different verticals which all complement each other. We help operators buy the right advertising inventory for their brand promotion on premium platforms, execute high performance marketing campaigns and retarget the audience through programmatic channels.”
The second key pillar, Paris explained, is the bwise Media affiliate business served through websites specifically aimed at emerging markets such as Brazil, Latin America or India.
“Affiliation is very complementary to our sales and media business, because we have the opportunity to offer exposure on our SEO websites, deliver significant volumes of high-quality conversions and provide extensive reviews of our client’s products, customer service, payments, bonuses and odds. It helps us get a deeper understanding of the brands that we are working with and see the effects of increased organic traffic from our media activities.”
As we’ve already alluded to, Brazil is the key market for bwise Media, both on the affiliate side and for what Paris defines as ‘premium marketing’ activities for gambling operators.
“Brazil is our biggest and most active market, it’s where we have a very significant exclusive portfolio. This includes 365Scores, which is one of the biggest live score applications in Brazil, BOLAVIP.com Brazil or popular fantasy app Parciais.”
This ‘exclusive’ reference is important to elaborate on, as it means more than an operator simply choosing an ordinary agency to manage their marketing campaigns. bwise Media can leverage a unique premium network of sports publishers.
bwise boosts a variety of services to their portfolio to further enhance their marketing capabilities for operators, such as creative service, ASO and user acquisition for mobile apps as well as programmatic media buying.
The agency, run by industry veterans, has an exceptional reputation among sports websites and live score apps. David Watkins, Chief Business Development Officer at LiveScore Group, says about bwise Media: “We have worked with bwise since their inception. They are a pleasure to work with thanks to their combination of experience, pragmatism and work ethic. They have a thorough understanding of both publisher and operator spaces which uniquely places them to meet the demands of performance marketing.”
Paris continued: “What makes us unique as a 360 digital marketing agency, is that we not only provide our services to gambling operators, we also manage an exclusive global portfolio of the most relevant digital platforms for gambling, especially in emerging markets.
“This gives us a huge competitive advantage and makes the work for both the publisher and operator much easier, more efficient and highly profitable. We tie all the strings together on our end and make sure our clients and partners benefit the most.”
Many of the most renowned operators enlist bwise Media as their independent marketing partner, providing marketing budgets and briefs for bwise to create, and then execute comprehensive media plans to their target audience.
“We aim for as little work as possible for our clients,” added Paris. “The operator provides us with the campaign direction, KPIs and budget. Then bwise adds significant value and create efficiencies by of finding and closing the right partners, leading negotiations, campaign management, optimisations as well as data-led reporting to provide insights for the business to improve on.”
“It’s important to recognise that the better and more transparent the relationship between the operator and bwise, the more bwise can do in terms of campaign optimisations and deliver the best results on brand reach, engagement and activations of new users.”
Brazil might be a long way from Europe, but marketing restrictions in Spain and Italy – two gambling powerhouses in their own right – highlight the clear advantages for a company such as bwise Media in diversifying its business across multiple territories.
Paris said: “One of the biggest challenges, but also one of the most exciting things about this business, is that the regulatory landscape changes constantly. If you fail to diversify your business, if you fail to think ahead or take certain precautions, if you only focus on one market and the rules change in that market – it may kill your business.
“This is why we focus on a lot of freshly regulated markets and emerging markets where we believe you will see regulation in the near future.
“In Europe there are markets with heavy advertising restrictions such as Italy and Spain, two countries with sports publishers that have huge audiences. The lack of revenue from advertising from gaming operators can be felt on the digital platforms just as much as it is by the leagues and clubs.
“Working with the likes of BeSoccer or OneFootball, the most popular football platforms in Spain and Italy respectively, we had to pivot and change our whole advertising strategy to comply with new restrictions like the Royal Decree in Spain. This includes developing dedicated gambling sections with age verification on the BeSoccer platforms or providing a match predication tool on OneFootball that engages the target audience like no other.”
To conclude this exclusive discussion with SBC Media, Paris reiterated the key company goal for bwise in the 12 months ahead. “Our ambition is to cement our very strong foothold in Brazil, Latin America and other emerging markets, and to strengthen our position as the number one choice for advertisers and publishers in this industry.”