iGaming Daily

Ivana Flynn (00:01.04)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the iGaming Daily by SBC to the marketing edition where we talk about everything important from marketing, branding and SEO. I am Ivana Flynn and today I am joined with two wonderful guests, Irina and Tara and we'll be talking everything about brand, branding, why is it important and how to take this challenge on in 2025. Welcome ladies, please introduce yourself. We'll go alphabetically so we start with Irina.

Irina Birsanescu (00:28.866)
Hello, hi. Lovely to be here with you ladies. It's really, really a pleasure to keep it super short. So I'm Irina. I've been in the B2Bi gaming marketing business for six years now. It's pretty much what I know, what I read and to be honest, probably what I overthink at night about. Right now I'm leading the marketing department at Iconic 21.

which is a content provider that recently rebranded and it's now carving its own path with very big plans for 2025, a growing portfolio and some very, very ambitious goals. And my job here, well, to pretty much turn those plans into something real and exciting through campaigns, through storytelling and to make sure that their audience is actually feeling something.

Ivana Flynn (01:20.684)
And we already said it, rebranding. That's another thing we'll be saying, talking about and discovering. So very good you're here with us. I worked with you and I know your work. You're just inspirational and amazing and one of the top branding specialists out there. Definitely for iGaming. I've never seen anyone better. And then we have got Tara. She was with Exciting Brand. She was in a Play and Go for many years. Now she's working as a coach and in a leadership. So she will help us understand the personal branding and how you deal with that. Tara, welcome.

Irina Birsanescu (01:22.88)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (01:51.557)
Hi Ivana, thank you so much. So I'm Tara, I'm the founder of Tice Coaching, so I'm a leadership coach and I work with everyone from new managers right up to C level. And I like to say that I basically train managers and help managers be managers and be better. But Ivana, yes, so my background is in marketing and I've worked in marketing for over 15 years. I was with Play & Go for nearly 10 years. Absolutely loved the business, loved what we did.

pursuing one of my other passions. And when we talk about branding, think branding is everything, regardless of what you're doing. And I think there's a lot of crossover and transferable skills, whether we talk about B2B gaming or setting up your own personal brand or anything of the sort.

Ivana Flynn (02:37.24)
And I will be covering it surprise, surprise from the SEO point of view. If you don't know, I live and breathe SEO. So we're going to start very, very easily. What is brand and why is it important for you as a person? Not just in your work, but why is brand important in your everyday life? Just to enlighten people. Because I don't want to just go like brand and, you know, huge I-gaming brands. I wouldn't want to put it in people's minds that brands are everywhere in our life. And how do they influence us? Why are they important for us?

What is it for you that brand means to you or how does this brand build loyalty with you?

Irina Birsanescu (03:15.084)
Well, I would say it's everything people think and feel when they come across a company, be it B2B, B2C, sometimes not even a company, it can be a person. It's the personality, it's the way the company or the person shows up in the world. It's what makes people remember you, trust you. And of course, the goal is to ultimately make people choose you or your company over someone else or something else. So...

The process of branding is how you shape that perception, of course. It's the way you tell your story. It's the way you express your emotions. It's the experience that you create at every single touch point. And this is like a general perspective, but when it comes to industries like gaming, more products start to blur together. Like branding is often...

the only thing that sets you apart because the products are similar, the brands tend to be similar between themselves. But if you put in the effort in branding, that's where the difference lies. So I would say that pretty much sums it up, so to speak, both within iGaming and outside of it.

Ivana Flynn (04:27.716)
Wonderful. What is it for you, Tara? What is branding for you?

Tara Alvarez Garcia (04:29.095)
I was going to say not much to add, Irina, so I loved your interpretation of it. I completely agree that it's also the reputation and what people remember. I think it's very much how you make people feel, whether that's when you go into a casino site or you walk into a shop or you meet a person and that's your personal brand. So I think it's all about as well the consistency. When you mentioned, you know, all your different touch points. So I think really strong brands are very consistent.

They have that human side to them as well. But I would always just talk about the consistency and authenticity for any sort of brand out there.

Ivana Flynn (05:08.056)
I love it. I would as well add transparency and loyalty. And for me, it comes from the values that company stands for. And it could be iGaming or not. OK, but for example, if it comes outside of iGaming, I would not buy cosmetics that is tested on animals, for example, OK, my personal belief. So I think it's the values. And people don't realize many times that brand is values. Many times they just think, logo, name, end of story, right? Do we have values in iGaming that can translate into brand?

Irina Birsanescu (05:31.223)
Yes.

Ivana Flynn (05:37.53)
Like, have you seen anything that can create a brand based on values? Because it's a little bit of world of sameness, right? Same slots, same payment methods, same didi-dada, same this and same that. So brand is the thing that needs to make you stand out and be remembered. And I think it comes from the core values that the company have. So which would be for you the values that could be B2B, could be B2C, could be personal branding on employer brand.

branding, my blending, employer branding, just in case we need to cut it out. What is it for you that makes good values that would translate into brand?

Irina Birsanescu (06:18.478)
I agree with you, Ivana. I transparency and creativity and passion, even though they sound generic in themselves, are the values that I think apply most in the sense that it starts with remembering that at the end of the day you're talking to people, you're talking to humans, right? So you need these sort of values and these sort of needs in order to touch your audience in some sort of way.

Decision makers in B2B aren't just job titles. Of course, they go through emotions like everyone else. They have good days, they have bad days, they have moments of frustrations or excitement or exhaustion. And when it comes to marketing, you shouldn't ignore those things. You need to make sure that you're following, let's say, the B2C trend, especially in industries like fast moving consumer goods. They use storytelling, they use metaphors, they use contrasts, they use

very unexpected associations and all these things make you feel something. And I think that obviously relates to the values themselves, making you relate to them, making you feel something. So I think that's what I gaming brands also need to tap into because it's not only about listening to product features or I don't know, USBs. It's also about finding the right emotional trigger and giving meaning to the dullest of products because sometimes of course they are very boring, so to speak, the market.

Ivana Flynn (07:45.762)
Yeah, we work with sort of boring products. But do we have that emotion in iGaming? Like what would be the emotion that can trigger people? Let's say our customers or B2B. What is the emotion that we can emphasize here? I mean...

Irina Birsanescu (07:47.448)
Yeah.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (07:47.495)
you

Irina Birsanescu (07:58.702)
Yeah, I would say that iGaming is an industry where you want to appeal to the egos of the decision makers. I know this might sound a bit harsh, but it is true. At the end of the day, all the operators and all the providers want to be the best in the industry. And you kind of need to instill that sense of success in them and you need to help them envision success. You need to help them see.

Ivana Flynn (08:11.663)
Yes.

Irina Birsanescu (08:28.206)
the success and I think through storytelling and through the way campaigns are being built in the B2B sphere would really work in that direction.

Ivana Flynn (08:36.428)
I love that. mean, yes, success. We are in such a hungry and very difficult industry. If you are not one of the wolves, if you are not one of the hungry people, you're not going to make it into a leadership. Now, I think this beautifully tie into Tara. What makes a good leader and how this leader can build a personal brand to attract good deals or good people to their company? How does it translate into coaching and leadership and what tools can people help to become this respected persona?

Irina Birsanescu (08:40.747)
Yes.

Ivana Flynn (09:05.796)
that brings business or brings actually good quality employees to your company because they see like, Tara is working there. I love her. I've seen her speaking there, there, there. I want to be with her. So what are the tools? What are the tricks that you would recommend people to do when they are building their personal brand and they're trying to grow their presence in our extremely difficult business?

Tara Alvarez Garcia (09:12.815)
Mm-hmm.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (09:19.695)
Alright.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (09:27.495)
I would, to be honest, say that a lot of things that you would do in building a personal brand would also tie in in any other sort of B2B brand. So, Irina, I loved how you were talking about emotions, which is 100%. I think you need to play on people's emotions in the correct way, of course. And storytelling, Irina, you mentioned storytelling as well. So I would always talk about the story, bringing people on your journey, being very authentic, talking about the problems that you solve.

Irina Birsanescu (09:45.262)
you

Irina Birsanescu (09:49.186)
Hmm.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (09:57.061)
And that could be as a leader or as a coach or as a B2B marketing or B2B platform provider. Okay. It's not just downtime we're solving, you know, so go the extra mile in that sort of thing. So I would, again, and it's just the authenticity. People are going to see through it. Your brand is everything about you, all your touch points. So I think it's just keeping consistent within that part as well.

Ivana Flynn (10:23.374)
And how would this translate to marketing yourself or marketing your services? What would you use for it? Is LinkedIn the place to grow your persona or other platforms? Or how would you go about this to grow a persona that attracts people and attracts business?

Tara Alvarez Garcia (10:38.009)
If you're B2B, I would absolutely say it must be LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is all for B2B. And then I would say, know, your Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and all that sort of stuff, which I'm not into. But then I would say that would go down to a little bit more of your B2C. But if you do want to attract, I would also talk about, okay, the storytelling, emotions, and being a thought leader.

And again, personal branding or as a B2B marketing business, what are you doing to push out that you are a thought leader and you know what you're talking about? Moderating panels, speaking on panels, coming on podcasts, bringing in more PR, getting your voice out there more. So I would always put that in as well.

Ivana Flynn (11:20.912)
So a little bit stroking our own egos. I mean, I love it. Absolutely me. So good. I will touch the brand a little bit from the SEO point of view and what Google is telling us in 2024, 2025, and probably onwards. They're saying brand is important. And I think as a provider, you know, we already mentioned Play and Go, they are nailing it. They are having a name. They build good games that you always connect like, oh, okay, this is them. This is them.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (11:24.839)
you

Ivana Flynn (11:50.55)
Operators as well, you recognize lots of big good names, not every operator and there are lots of all of these new crypto casinos just coming and going, coming and going. I think they're failing, but the big stable operators, their names are just surface every time you think online casino or sports book. But I think affiliates are suffering little bit. We have got handful of affiliates that have managed to build their brand. And I think this is failing mainly because they forgot to bring

in their product head, right? They just generate 3000 pages of AI content, put it out there and they have affiliate website. For me, this is wrong. They should go and look what is the one product we can push. Could be we are extremely strong in building awareness on games or payments or casino groups, how they work together.

There could be an affiliate that compares license to license, casino to casino, them together. And this is how I would build a brand. What would you recommend for affiliates to build a product and build a brand as the experts? Because we know this is being pushed and affiliates still call themselves, you know, affiliate 12345, 123456, 1234567. And they just pick up a penalty, disappear, come back.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (13:04.687)
Yeah.

Ivana Flynn (13:09.978)
But if we are going to build a strong brand, you as experts in branding that you worked with massive strong brands and you helped to build them in Irina's case, what would be, how would you help them to go about this? Because if you Google anything, few brands of affiliates always come to the surface and rest are somewhere nowhere to be seen or come up for a few days and nowhere to be seen. But obviously what would be your approach for me to be the product and good name and then building something strong.

But Irina, may I ask your expertise here?

Irina Birsanescu (13:42.156)
Yeah, of course. I think it really relates to the other questions that we just answered. Ivana, I think it's a lot about personalization and storytelling, because as you were saying, there are affiliate brands that appear every single day. Like there are so many names out there, so many generic websites as well. They don't try to tell any story. They don't come up with mascots. They don't come up with

very memorable color schemes and stuff like that. mean, even though this is like the super basic of branding, at the end of the day, does matter, especially when you're working with a B2C audience, because you want your players to remember you, right? And you are mentioning the giants in the affiliate industry that are always popping up in the Google search results. I think what they are nailing is the fact that they got the right combination of a good name that's SEO friendly.

good branding, high quality looking websites that instill trust, some sort of a story because there are affiliate websites that do tell a story, and in combination with very high quality content because as you mentioned, AI became the norm for many of those affiliate websites that sadly get lost somewhere in the affiliation space.

But what people should remember is that AI at the end of the day is just a tool. It's nothing more, it's nothing less. If you use it in a generic way, you're going to get generic results. If you put more instructions into it, if you use it for brainstorming, for speeding up certain processes, for assisting with certain processes, that makes a huge difference. So the difference is always staying in how you use it and how you...

put your own creativity into the process, your own tone of voice, layering the human insight into it, adding strategic thinking to it. Yes, then it simply becomes a very good marketing assistant that's cheap and one of the best out there and the fastest learner, of course. But it's all a matter of finding the right combo of good branding elements, high quality content.

Irina Birsanescu (15:56.162)
That can be produced with the help of AI, but not to a generic extent, which is the practice that we see most often. And the story, coming up with something memorable, something that players would remember, would like, would maybe laugh about, and would naturally return to.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (16:12.283)
Mm-hmm.

Ivana Flynn (16:14.19)
Okay, so emotion again, they would laugh about it, right? They will remember. again, we're going back to, and I love this because we're going back to human speaking to human, even though you're mentioning how AI can help. But can AI do branding on its own? Can you just say like, create this website for me, beautiful AI tool.

Irina Birsanescu (16:15.779)
Yeah.

Irina Birsanescu (16:24.003)
Yes.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (16:24.956)
Yep.

Irina Birsanescu (16:26.56)
Mm-hmm.

Irina Birsanescu (16:31.158)
No.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (16:32.933)
think it helps with efficiency AI, but it's not going to replace the creation part. So I would rely on AI for efficiency, but not creation, my personal opinion.

Irina Birsanescu (16:46.574)
Totally agree with you.

Ivana Flynn (16:46.576)
I use AI a lot for like the simplest tasks, like when I already have my ideas together, I was like, okay, I put this together for me, you know, but otherwise I wouldn't. However, people still do it. And I recently ran a test. So I created a website year before the last of 2023 with AI content. It started to rank, like it was, it's a test. I'm an SEO nerd, I test alone.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (17:00.475)
Mm-hmm.

Ivana Flynn (17:13.294)
And then the March update came and completely ruined it because it AI content and this one was on AI. I migrated it to again, very extremely generic affiliate one, two, three, four, five X sort of domain. Same content started to rank and now January update came exactly the same as last year. AI just disappeared. So we cannot rely on AI. cannot rely on generic tricks and we cannot rely on Blackhead SEO. I think that's one of the things we need to say here, but they're definitely.

tips and tricks we can use AI for. So what would you use it? Like if you are building a brand, what would you use it for? Irina went very deeply for it, but Tara, what about if you are building your personal branding, where can AI step in and help you? For example, I absolutely hate and detest, and I would prohibit it using LinkedIn when I publish something and somebody comments and it just completely regard it to me what I just said in my post saying, yes, you are right. This, this, this, this, this is important. Congratulations. And then you're like,

Irina Birsanescu (18:03.086)
Thank

Tara Alvarez Garcia (18:07.151)
ha ha.

Ivana Flynn (18:12.494)
I tested it once and I put some completely random Slovak word into it and that AI comment used that AI Slovak random word. So I think that's where it doesn't step in, but people seem to believe that creating 10,000 comments like this in a day builds their brand. I don't agree. Where do you stand on that?

Tara Alvarez Garcia (18:22.673)
Ha ha.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (18:29.733)
No, I don't agree at all. And I hate when I see content that you can tell has been written by AI. I use AI, use ChatGPT. It's, you know, always on my browser. I use it all the time, but in a totally different way. I always want to make sure that it's authentic. Sometimes I use it for my own personal brand. If I'm stuck on what to do, it's like, I imagine if I was in an office and I would ask my colleagues something, then I just ask ChatGPT something. Sometimes it just helps me unlock the barrier I'm in, get a different perspective.

So if I was building a personal brand, would say, okay, imagine you are a leadership coach. How would you build your personal brand? And I don't have to agree with everything it says, but sometimes it does give me that extra shift. Ivana, one thing that I really did want to mention, Irina, when you were talking earlier as well, I find it very ironic when, Ivana, you mentioned affiliates. There's affiliates one, two, three, four, everything looks the same. It's ironic that we were...

in the gaming industry, a high risk industry, yet many marketing departments are very risk averse and they conform. Websites look exactly the same, a lot of similar colors, it's very generic. We're in the gambling industry, we should be risky, we should be bold. I would go back to the why and the brand purpose and you know you have to be consistent and you don't do anything that can be detriment to your brand or to the business.

Irina Birsanescu (19:37.854)
Yeah.

Ivana Flynn (19:38.219)
yes.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (19:59.675)
But I think within this industry, I we should be a bit more bold. Irene, I know you're working directly now in marketing, but that's where I would always see it.

Irina Birsanescu (20:09.47)
No, 100 % I completely agree with you. mean, B2B marketing in general can be dry, but when it comes with iGaming, it's even trickier because the products are very niche. We're talking about very highly technical solutions, industry-specific terminology, a target audience that already knows all that information. So you're basically just repeating yourself over and over again. And I think that's why everything kind of feels the same because most B2B iGaming brands are following the exact same unwritten rule book.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (20:28.721)
Mm-hmm.

Irina Birsanescu (20:37.398)
of marketing that has been shaped over years, attending the events and spending big on sponsorships and doing some media buying on the news outlets that are most popular in the industry, pushing out promotional content that kind of looks the same and covers the exact same topics in the exact same way. So it's difficult, but you know, the thing is that these methods still work.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (20:40.39)
Yes.

Irina Birsanescu (20:59.522)
So unless a brand actively wants to stand out and to create a brand that's memorable and that's exciting and that stirs that controversy, then they won't do it. So it's very difficult to encourage B2B brands to be acceptance of that type of risk activity, so to speak, in marketing.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (21:11.227)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (21:21.605)
And not just the risk, I think it's also the monetary investment. whilst, yes, it's working, it could be so much better. Even if you think of something like Bigwin videos, many of them are just in-game snapshots. Okay, capture the Bigwin out. Then some brands would go and invest even more and put the human element into it. And that's when we play on the emotions and we go back to the storytelling. And I think it's these key themes we keep mentioning throughout this podcast, which we keep drawing back to.

Irina Birsanescu (21:24.535)
Yes.

Irina Birsanescu (21:31.756)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Irina Birsanescu (21:49.026)
Mm-hmm.

Ivana Flynn (21:51.12)
But it's good, we narrowed it down to something we can take away from this podcast. So we know that brand needs to be original. It needs to play to our emotions as consumers or as leaders. We know that AI can help but can't do it for us. And with that, I would say thank you very much ladies. This was an amazing discussion. I loved every word of it because...

Irina Birsanescu (21:55.438)
Mm.

Ivana Flynn (22:16.194)
I'm very much into branding. am very much into marketing and I always like to learn. That's why I invite the most clever people to this podcast so I can learn and I learn tons. So I really hope that you learned as well and that you enjoyed our podcast and you will come back for the next one. Thank you. Bye.

Irina Birsanescu (22:31.906)
Thank you so much, Ivana.

Tara Alvarez Garcia (22:32.133)
Thank you so much.