Following a sluggish 2020 so far, the world is slowly returning to normal. And as part of this, a handful of real-life conferences are coming back to the forefront.
This includes in the world of iGaming. Affiliate marketing expert Giannis Koutivas will be attending one of these in October with KingBet Media, which is titled GAME.
GAME stands for the Gaming & Affiliate Marketing Expo, with KingBet Media being an official media partner.
We spoke to Giannis about the upcoming event in Athens, as well as the upcoming Google ‘Cookiepocalypse’ and more.
Affiverse: Tell us a bit about the iGaming conference you’re attending in September. What do you think will be different about them, compared to conferences pre-coronavirus?
Giannis Koutivas: “We are totally extroverted during this period! We want to give knowledge and value back to the community that has granted us with so many things in recent years.
“One of the best ways to do this is to support conferences, big and small, and be there to help the industry grow. We are proud to be media partners of the GAME Event, held by the guys on Eventus International. It is held on Athens, during the first two days of October. We will be there, waiting for you to talk about delivering value to the Greek market.
AI: A lot has been discussed about Google’s ‘cookiepocalypse’. What are your thoughts and how do you think that iGaming affiliates can adapt to the third-party cookie changes?
GK: “I think this is the elephant in the room. It all depends, whether the stakeholders (actually the browsers) are committed to reshaping the internet in a place where privacy is number one concern. If not, then this won’t change anything at all.
“New techniques will emerge and it will be business as usual. But if they are, then this could be the end of the web as we know it. Websites will need to rely on 1st party data, which means they need to produce their own ways of remarketing and not rely on other media networks.
“Affiliate marketing won’t be affected at all. On the contrary it will be king, because operators will see the affiliates’ traffic as the best-targeted traffic they can find. This will totally upgrade the affiliates’ role.”
AI: Since the world started to open up again, what changes within affiliate marketing have you noticed?
GK: “We feel that online conferences are here to stay for some time, even though the feeling is nowhere near the same as the real-life ones.
“In the absence of sports, esports and virtual games benefitted – as many predicted they would. We think that these will continue to gain momentum going forward.”
AI: What future opportunities do you think have arisen within affiliate marketing over the past couple of months?
GK: “Promoting online casino brands, of course. We even had to promote casino brands through our sports betting channels! The growth we all saw was monstrous, once there were no sports events to bet on.
“Media production is also one of our concerns for the future. We wanna deliver the full value to operators. Both brand awareness and performance. We already host our own online slots Twitch show with kingbet.net and we plan to expand this tactic to both becasino.com and helpbet.com, our English websites.”
