Many iGaming companies still hire full-time CMOs. At what point should an operator or supplier consider bringing in a fractional CMO instead?
The honest answer is that it comes down to the stage a business is at and the problem it’s facing. A fractional CMO is best placed at a company that is in need of senior marketing leadership, yet the workload, budget or maturity doesn’t yet justify a permanent role. The situations that call for one are varied, and these are only a few of many. It might be a company heading into a new market, or one trying to breathe life into a tired brand, or a business finding its feet again after a senior figure has walked. It could just as easily be an earlier-stage supplier scaling beyond founder-led marketing, or any moment where seasoned marketing leadership matters and a permanent hire would be premature.
What a fractional CMO brings is the seniority, the network and the pattern recognition of someone who has done it many times, focused on the two or three decisions that genuinely move the needle. The trap to avoid is hiring a full-time CMO to solve what is really a strategy problem.
What types of companies are most likely to seek this service: startups, affiliates, licensed operators, or B2B suppliers?
In our experience, it predominantly skews towards B2B suppliers, particularly game studios, platform providers, payment companies, technology businesses and other fast-growing suppliers. These businesses often have brilliant product and thin marketing, so a fractional CMO helps them tell a commercial story to the operators they sell to without carrying a full department year-round. Earlier-stage suppliers and startups tend to want senior direction on positioning and go-to-market before they can justify a permanent hire.
Affiliates are also a part of the equation today, a growing one as the model matures and they invest in their own brands. The common thread is a business that has outgrown improvised marketing and needs a steady, senior pair of hands for a particular chapter, rather than forever.
Which marketing channels currently deliver the best return on investment for sports betting and online casino brands?
There isn’t a single marketing channel that consistently delivers the best ROI, because the answer depends entirely on the business, its objectives and where it is in its growth journey. The mistake many companies make is looking for a silver bullet, when in reality it’s the combination of channels working together that delivers the strongest results.
For B2B iGaming suppliers, we often see the greatest return come from a strategic mix of PR, LinkedIn, thought leadership, SEO and events, supported by targeted paid activity where appropriate. Together, these channels build visibility, credibility and familiarity, all of which are essential in a relationship-driven industry.
The most successful brands don’t judge channels in isolation. They look at how each one contributes to wider commercial objectives, whether that’s building authority, generating inbound opportunities, supporting product launches or strengthening relationships with operators and partners. Marketing works best when every channel has a clear role within a wider strategy, rather than competing for attention or budget.
What mistakes do you see most often from companies entering newly regulated markets, such as Brazil?
The classic mistake is treating a newly regulated market as a land grab and blitzing acquisition before the foundations are in place. Brazil is an obvious example. Operators arrived expecting to buy their way to scale, then found that everyone was bidding on the same keywords and chasing the same football sponsorships, acquisition costs spiralled, and the brands that won were the ones that had done the unglamorous work first.
That work is localisation done properly, alongside compliance built in from day one. With the market now firmly in its enforcement phase and advertising rules tightening, the companies struggling are those that assumed European practices would simply transfer. The second mistake is impatience. You build your brand and trust over an eighteen-month horizon in these markets, so treating Brazil as a quarterly numbers game tends to burn through budget and goodwill.
Which widely used marketing strategy in the iGaming industry do you believe is overrated?
The over-reliance on aggressive welcome bonuses as the primary acquisition tool. They’re easy to measure and they fill the top of the funnel, so they feel like they’re working. The problem is that they disproportionately attract bonus hunters with little loyalty and often negative lifetime value, and they train a whole market to compete on price rather than on product or experience. If every brand is shouting about the same offer, it stops being a differentiator and becomes a simple cost of entry. The bigger prize sits in the data. A brand gains far more when it takes the time to understand what a player actually enjoys and shapes its rewards around that, since a relevant, well-judged incentive earns loyalty in a way a blanket sign-up offer never can.
I would put a good deal of influencer marketing in the same column, at least the way it is often bought, with large followings, little relevance and no measurement. Used well, both of these have a place. Used as a substitute for a genuine reason to choose your brand, they quietly drain budgets while the metrics that actually matter – retention and lifetime value – stay flat.
If you had to choose just one Latin American market outside Brazil to receive marketing investment over the next five years, which would it be and why?
Peru. Colombia is the safer answer and I understand why people give it, as it was the region’s first regulated market, it is stable and it is the benchmark everyone measures against. That maturity cuts both ways, though, because the field is crowded and the easy growth has largely been had.
Peru is roughly where Brazil sat a couple of years ago. It now has a clear national licensing framework, a fast-growing and mobile-first player base of several million, a real football culture, and a window in which brand can still be built before the market saturates. The operators who invest in brand and localisation in Peru over the next five years will own share that becomes expensive to buy later. It’s a view we explored in depth in our GO Intel Beyond Brazil report, which looked closely at Peru, Chile and Uruguay. I would keep a close eye on Chile in particular, which could open properly within that horizon, but for a market you can act on today, Peru is where I would place the bet.
