It was our privilege to be on the panel speaking on  ‘Perception Matters: Lessons from Big Tech and Other Industries for the iGaming World’ at iGaming NEXT Valletta 2023. For those that weren’t able to make it, we’ve summarised some of the main discussion points below.

Appetite for innovation
We talked about industry leaders in innovation and what principles the iGaming world can learn from. Several examples were given of where industry leaders have essentially cannibalised their main offering in their evolutionary process, such as:

Amazon launched an e-reader device and starting selling digital books, potentially cannibalising physical book sales. Our CEO Emma was deeply involved in the launch of Kindle for Amazon UK, so spoke from personal experience on how the business navigated the change, incentivising teams and promoting healthy competition within the business before bringing digital and physical teams together as the Kindle business grew. She shared Amazon’s principles of disrupting and simplifying innovation and how employee success is measured based on achieving that. 

Emma made the point that some businesses settle for innovation that focuses purely on continuously improving what they’ve got. But by doing this they’re potentially missing out, because sometimes you’ve got to be prepared to take big risks and potentially upset traditional models to seize an opportunity ahead of a competitor.

Apple’s Johnny Ives had an interesting approach to the development of their business, product and service offering. Not being interested in what the market wanted, believing that like the Henry Ford attributed quote about faster horses, that consumers aren’t capable of thinking far enough away from what they know to consider innovation of any sort. Instead, he was more interested in people’s feedback on what they developed and innovated, in order to iterate it. 

McDonalds is a great example of leading tangential change, fulfilling their vision to be ‘the most progressive burger company in the world’.  They’ve innovated fantastically to become leaders in changing the fast food experience. They’ve even broadened their offering from beef burgers and chips to encompass chicken, salads and plant based products. It’s also worth noting that they recycle their oil and have moved away from plastic straws and toys to more earth conscious choices to live out their ESG initiatives. 

GoCodeGreen got a mention as a company that is helping businesses to ‘clean up their act’ in terms of assessing and improving the environmental impact of software services. Along with financial savings, undertaking ESG initiatives like decarbonising your digital activities can make for good news stories that help to reset the commonly negative public perceptions of the industry.

Considering these examples of innovative businesses, prompted the panel to pose the question of where we see bold steps at scale like these in the iGaming industry?

Transparency and trust
Transparency and trust seem to be big issues in the iGaming industry, with the industry as a whole largely being tarred with a perception around dodgy financial dealings. The panel discussed how to combat these perceptions. 

The panel talked about how to manage the perception and narrative around your business with the advice being to be honest and authentic with how you respond to media triage situations, as the public will soon rumble a cover-up! 

Having a crisis communications plan ready for moments like this will help. The plan should contain details for all of the people who might be involved in dealing with a crisis, not only PR, but leadership, tech personnel, legal etc. A plan like this should include prioritised actions to determine the approach categorised by different levels of severity (from one of minimal impact requiring internal messaging, to one of international public impact). 

Where possible explain the situation, how it happened and what steps you’re taking for it not to happen again. People want to hear that you’re being accountable and responsible and doing something about it. Responding promptly is also important, timing is everything to ensuring it doesn’t become a bigger problem. Where you can, sharing good news alongside bad, can help the way in which it’s received. 

The panel also discussed the role that tone of voice plays in reinforcing the authenticity  of your brand. By communicating consistently in your brands authentic voice you are taking the opportunity to inject your brand identity into PR campaigns. 

Data-driven enterprise
The panel noted a lag between other industries and iGaming in being data-driven. They encouraged the audience to appreciate the value of user behaviour data and aligned responses. Suggesting that the industry evaluate our data more and build models for success based on it. 

The use of Ai was also a big area of discussion across the entire conference. Our panel recommended that businesses spend time finding out how their teams are using it already and look at the opportunities to build on that, making it clear to clients when they’re engaging with Ai. Common use cases include:

• Optimising the work of first line support.
• Saving design teams time on trivial everyday tasks, enabling them to be more creative. 
• The use of AI generated text across a number of use cases.

To dispel the myths around people’s perceptions of engaging with Ai, Andy (Rogers) shared stats from a study into GP healthcare where half of the sample interacted with a GP and the other an AI bot. The study found that 80% of people preferred dealing with an AI bot from a perspective of getting a concise diagnosis. Whilst this isn’t entirely surprising, what is, is  that 45% rated Ai as empathetic, where 5% considered GPs to be empathetic! 

The study proved that it’s not just about the information that’s delivered, it’s how it’s communicated that is important. It was also felt that there was value in explaining how Ai decisions are made, citing references that have informed that decision to aid comprehension. There’s a real challenge for the industry to be able to deliver information in a way that represents those qualities at significant scale.

Thanks to our fellow panelists, Andy Rogers (CEO of Rokker & The Rokker Network) and Max Trafimovich, Chief Commercial Officer of SOFTSWISS, and moderator Nick McDonald, Global Account Director of Fujitsu.

You can watch the recording of this session here between timecodes 01:43:33 – 02:07:11

If you’d like to carry on this discussion with us please contact us.