Press Conference

Thursday 20th May was the date for raff.me to be presented to the media.  Over 20 journalists from different areas in the media, from newspapers to radios and online news portals attended the event organised together with Microsoft, our technology partner and pasiona, our development partner.

The event started with a quick presentation of the speakers by the moderator, Ariadna Boada who introduced Enrique Fernandez, Microsoft's Director of Development, Ernest Pagès, Raff Ltd's CEO and David Teixidó, pasiona's CEO.

Enrique focused his speech on the vision Microsoft has for the future, giving special emphasis to cloud computing and pervasive computing with the concept of the three screens (computer, telephone & TV). Enrique mentioned the different innovation centres Microsoft is promoting to help universities, entrepreneurs, software vendors etc. improve the knowledge and use of Microsoft Technologies.

When it was my turn, I started the presentation with the video I had previously posted in this blog, which I think explains the raff.me concept in a quick and easy way. Helped by 4 slides, I tried to explain:

·         What raff.me is

·         The  characteristics of the model

·         raff.me today

·         Short term plans

David Teixido finished the presentation with a quick overview of the implementation process, focusing on the quality and development methodology they use and the challenges they had faced.

A quick tour on the site to see the different types of raffles we are holding and the services offered to users, ended our presentation.

It was the time for questions. There were questions regarding legal aspects and why Malta, questions about the types and value of raffles, choices of payment gateways... etc, which helped in a better understanding of the site.

Once the question time was over, we proceeded to the gardens for fantastic cocktails and to celebrate the presentation of raff.me to society.

Free iPad Raffle. Campaign Design

Name:

20min Free iPad

Objectives:

1. Generate new registrations on the site.

2. Learn from the experience

Scope:

Spain

Media:

20minutos.com cross-site banners. 20 minutos is the most read free newspaper in Spain and the electronic edition is the second most visited news site.

Goals:

· Good: 5000 registrations

· Fair: 2000 registrations

· Bad: 1000 registrations

Design:

Landing page with a short explanation of the site and the raffle.

The Participate button takes you to a registration page where you only have to enter your e-mail address to get a free ticket for the iPad raffle.

Advertising Methodology

Marketing & Advertising has never been a science where one plus one equals two. In fact it can equal three or minus four.  But when you add the word internet into the equation, the results can be bewildering because it can equal five hundred or you can directly bite the dust.  The nice thing about it is that you enter into the twilight zone - everything is possible. If somebody tells you they have the knowledge and expertise and know what really works on the net, run away and don't look back, you are in danger.

Advertising Methodology

But, when you do things, you have to follow a  method. You can modify it or change it, but you at least need a method. I am writing my method. I am not saying that it works, but it is the one that I am going to follow… for now. It is an exercise of putting on paper (in a post) the initial method and the different modifications in a reasoned way. Let's start.

My Method (today)

Marketing & advertising on the internet is not a science but must be worked with the scientific method of trial and error.

1. Start by emptying your mind of prejudices and making and educated guess of how to attract customers to your page.
2. Implement it
3. Put all the necessary tools in place to analyse your client's behaviour and start your data capturing. Google Analytics can help in this phase. Their tools are easy to understand, simple to implement and give you a wide range of information. And it is for free. 
4. Never launch a massive campaign. Always make sure you can pause your campaign to adjust parameters and resume it to continue with the data capturing.
5. Pause -Analyse -Modify - Resume -Capture-Pause-…
6. Never think the results you get from your analysis are a consistent truth. 

Gaming License

Let me explain briefly how gaming licenses work in Malta and what different types of licenses you can apply for.

Remote gaming in Malta is regulated by the Remote Gaming Regulations, 2004 issued under the Lotteries and Other Games Act 2001 ("LOGA"). The regulatory body in Malta supervising remote gaming operation is the Lotteries and Gaming Authority ("LGA").

In order to provide remote betting/gaming services from Malta, one needs to obtain a license of the class appropriate to the operations. I have been dealing with the whole process and it has been tough work. They ask for all the details of your operations and the requirements are really strict. It is a pity that customers don't realize how strict it is because that would make them feel safer and more secure.

Licensees are expected to operate in compliance to LOGA and the Regulations, as well as anti-money laundering legislations, e-commerce legislation and any other relevant law. The following four classes of licenses are available in Malta:

Class 1: For operators managing their own risk on repetitive games. This class covers casino-type games, skill games and online lotteries.

Class 2: For operators managing their own risk on events based on a matchbook. Under this class falls fixed odds betting, pool betting and spread betting.

Class 3: For operators taking a commission from promoting and/or betting games. This class includes P2P, poker networks, betting exchange and game portals.

Class 4: To host and manage remote gaming operators, excluding the licensee himself. This is intended for software vendors who want to provide management and hosting facilities on their platform.

We operate under a Class 3 license because we earn commissions from raffles.

A basic tenet of the Regulations is the requirement that the core part of the online gaming/betting operations must be physically located in Malta.

Marketing Strategy

Does somebody really know how to launch a new site like raff.me? I am really tired of listening to the "specialists", the ones who theoretically are the gurus of this 2.0 universe. We have been working with different agencies and what is a sacred rule for one, is a fatal error for another. You finally end up with a nice guy who admits that there are neither sacred rules nor fatal errors. There are growing trends in certain directions, but no one can tell that something that has worked well with other sites will work fine for you. It is a game of test and error. Good.  I didn't need gurus to get to this point.

If you have a huge budget and you can play the game until you find your own recipe, you are lucky, but that is not our case. We need to guess where our balance between online & offline marketing, viral marketing, brand building, SEM, SEO, SMM…and a long series of other acronyms is. Too many variables in the recipe to get the right flavour in the first try.

Viral Marketing

The first serious proposal from the agency was a viral campaign based on a video. They worked on a good script. The main character was a funny freak that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Augmented reality gags made it spectacular and the result would surely be a good video. Probably a viral one, in fact they guaranteed more than 500K views. Spectacular! But is it really what we need? If 500K internet users enjoy 30 seconds of a good video, will this drive them to my page? And what is even more important, will they register? Or it will just make some branding and they will get familiar with the brand and will recognise it the next time they listen to it? That's not worth 70% of my marketing budget. Nice but not worth it.

Social Marketing

Besocialmyfriend. The next agency was a hyper-social one. The secret lies in being social, creating communities and living in facebook and twitter. They are probably right. Social Media is the present and the future, but to draw a strategy you cannot be obsessive. There is life offline and you can't ignore it. There is an old saying that states "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Our Strategy

We're back to our initial thoughts. We are launching a raffle platform, how can we promote it? Through raffles! We are creating promotional raffles, some of them free raffles and we are designing a banner and advertising campaign based on some massively visited sites, facebook and AdWords. We are creating focused campaigns to filtered targets, pointing to free raffles of their interest in music, technology, cooking, sports… .

I will go into further detail in future posts.