Google revises German ad policy to ban affiliates promoting unlicensed operators

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David Murphy, who was brought in as CMO at QiH back in April, is keen to touch on the most recent milestone at the affiliate and white-label operator. The UK sports vertical was officially launched in the middle of August but in reality was first tested during Euros 2024.

The soft launch for the football tournament was for QiH just getting the car through first and second gear. However, with the official announcement coming in line with the Premier League’s return in August, the company now finds itself dropping officially into third gear of the vertical’s launch.
“We’re going to put significant investment into sports,” explains Murphy. “The key to why we launched a new vertical, and one I still emphasise to the team, is that there is no point just delivering volume, it's also about value.

“We could just look for short term gains and deliver a larger volume of players to operators but at the end of the day I want to build long-term relationships with them and that’s why we’ve delved into the sports area where there’s a greater lifetime value of customers.”

Power of BI

The CMO says that it wasn’t a hard sell to get the marketing team to buy into the project of launching a new vertical. “Everybody here was pretty much chomping at the bit to in some way turn the hobby into a job, as obviously they have a passionate interest in sport.”

Murphy is no stranger to the igaming industry, with stints at both Lottoland and Gamesys in his 15-year career on the operator side of igaming. The attraction of coming to be QiH’s first CMO is relatively simple: the affiliate’s strong growth and research.

“QiH has grown over the last three years by about 75% year-on-year,” Murphy states. The secret behind the growth can be found in its business intelligence (BI) insights.

“The BI insight we have is probably not available to any of the operators I’ve worked at for the last 15 years,” explains the won-over CMO. “The operators don’t have this level of data visualisation or the data input about value clients, which allows us to make decisions straight away.”

Once he came on board, Murphy went to work in helping map out QiH’s expansion plans which is best described as a three-fold strategy. Composed of channel development, vertical expansion and geo expansion, the plan spans almost every part of the business.

“Since I’ve been here we’ve expanded our paid social activities quite significantly,” tells Murphy on the channel development stage. “We’re delving into YouTube and programmatic marketing from September with even more plans to expand out from there.”

Advertising regulation playbook

Working across a new territory poses another question for QiH, which already balances regulation and compliance activity across the marketing activity and operator sides of its business.

“We’ve got a playbook about regulation around advertising,” explains the CMO. “It’s something we need to adhere to as we launch into the US and also have everything we have on regulation practices checked with outside compliance departments to make sure we’re following the rules in place.”
Murphy, though, is someone who’s in favour of anything that’s going to protect the customer when it comes to marketing regulation for gambling content. “I’m very aware we’re in an industry that’s a leisure pursuit and I might have a bet on the weekend on the football as much as any of our customers will.

“I know there’s other pleasure pursuits we’re competing with for that dollar of disposable income, but day-to-day it’s really important for me that people are betting as a pleasure pursuit rather than as something that they feel is a need to do so.”