Looking beyond new-customer signups or first-time deposits is essential to building a community of long-term casino customers, Matt Estremera says.
“The market is so increasingly competitive that you need to stand out,” said Estremera, partner and lead creative producer at MediaNug, which specializes in mobile performance advertising across social and digital platforms. “You need to generate creative-first and social-first content. You can only win so many people with an offer, but how do you retain them? You build out creative content and messaging that builds a community and keeps them coming back.”
MediaNug, which counts BetMGM, DraftKings, and Caesars Palace Online among its gaming clients, produces all types of digital ad formats for multiple industries and boasts a roster of more than 3,000 vetted creators of user-generated content. In the gaming sector, the company works with online and land-based casinos, sportsbooks, and prediction markets.
“Our creative content is built to drive performance,” Estremera said. “We source creators who resonate with the particular audience or persona groups you’re targeting.”
While ad campaigns are judged on bottom-line factors such as player acquisition cost or first-time deposits, MediaNug also compiles “creative metrics” to better understand why specific ads or creative styles resonate with viewers. Those include views, click, and total watch time.
MediaNug also measures the effectiveness of the “opening hook,” or first three seconds of a video, with a “thumb-stop ratio” showing the percentage of people who paused scrolling to view the ad. That helps the team pinpoint the most successful elements and “leverage that winning ad format as much as we can while continuously finding new (winning approaches).”
Estremera said operators get the best results from digital ads that lean heavily into native platform and user-generated content. He suggested clients test a variety from the dozens of formats available, such as green-screen, walk-and-talk videos, podcasts, and people-on-the-street interviews. “You need to have a good creative mix, and you need to identify other winning formats.”
A campaign that works for one operator won’t necessarily work for all. “You have to build content that resonates with your particular audience,” Estremera said.
A successful digital campaign requires a sound creative strategy, he added. “It’s not just about having creative diversification. If you don’t have a structured plan to amplify your top-performing assets, then you’re missing out on scale. We definitely like to drive creative strategy and build a winning formula for each operator.”
For land-based casinos, an effective ad campaign could look completely different from an online operation. Land-based casinos can emphasize local activities and local residents. He said MediaNug can arrange for a small video team to accompany locally based content creators to visit a casino to capture 20 to 40 content pieces in one day. A hyper-local campaign helps enhance the authenticity of the message.
In contrast, sportsbooks ads typically revolve around the sports themselves and their “tentpole” moments such as season openers, rivalry games, playoffs, and championship matchups.
He said any operator, whether online, land-based casino, sportsbook, prediction market, or vendor, should follow the same overarching creative model. First, develop a bank of ideas, messaging and ad formats, then incorporate those into a testing environment.
“As soon as you find a winning ad format, you want to scale what’s working and create more of that style of creative. The goal is how many winning ad formats you can have in in paid campaigns. A structured creative system wins over anyone else who’s just throwing content at the wall and losing efficiencies.”
Operators should strive not only to differentiate themselves but also to take more risks and test more than their competitors, he said.
“Vendors or operators who are the most successful embrace a creative system that can be scaled,” he said. “A lot of brands say ‘we need more creative, we need more creative.’ Yes, you do. But you want more creative that wins.”
