Raising Responsible Gaming Awareness Through Affiliate Marketing
ATHENS, January 9, 2023 – Online gaming is definitely reporting major growth in the past few years. Undoubtedly, affiliate marketing has its own share in this success. Yet, the nature of affiliate marketing makes several people wonder whether such marketing and promotion practices can be aligned with Responsible Gaming.
OPAP, the leader of Responsible Gaming (RG) in Greece, utilized these concerns creatively, as part of its ongoing efforts to innovate and provide its customers a gaming environment that combines best-in-class entertainment with player protection.
Taking a major step forward for both the local betting landscape, OPAP leveraged affiliate marketing as a channel of promoting RG messages. This initiative was taken as part of OPAP’s integrated Responsible Gaming awareness campaign, which was launched in 2022, with the core “Don’t drop the ball on having control”.
Why is this special?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing channel, which addresses a broad target audience, which is interested in sports, betting and casino games. Typically, it creates value and trust for a betting brand through dedicated content, while deploying various actions to drive traffic to the websites of advertised companies.
This triggered OPAP to negotiate and agree with its affiliate partners to join the mission of spreading the word about RG. Affiliates used their outlets, social media accounts, and website content to support the campaign and reach out to the widest possible audience.
This was the first time a Greek gaming operator utilized affiliates to promote Responsible Gaming principles and provide useful relevant advice and guidelines to both players and non-players.
What were the results?
The primary target of this initiative was not only to raise RG awareness but also to educate potential bettors, by routing them to a designated website, which includes relevant information and encourages them to take self-assessment tests that would help them identify potentially problematic behaviors. Overall, the affiliate marketing initiative met its goals, with about 600,000 people seeing the campaign and its main message, and 5,000 visiting the aforementioned webpage.
What’s the way forward?
After successfully utilizing this channel for the first time, OPAP’s plan is not only to repeat this awareness initiative but also to increase its frequency and scale, by adding more affiliates in the mix.
OPAP strives to make gaming and betting safer for everyone and undertakes every effort to continuously support its customers and meet their needs, in a responsible and transparent manner.
To enable players to make informed choices, OPAP provides them with timely, accurate and sufficient information about its products, the terms, and conditions of their use, as well as the risks and consequences that might arise through excessive participation in games of chance.
After all, providing players with the right information before being engaged with games of chance is key to maintaining the fun element of gaming, which is OPAP’s top priority for its customers.
SOURCE: OPAP / WLA.
