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Cross-selling pushing William Hill forward
Telephone, LBO, online and mobiles might not sound like comfortable bedfellows but Ralph Topping is doing his best to make them all work together at William Hill.
MULTI-CHANNEL William Hill chief executive Ralph
Topping has been extolling the virtues of his firm’s multi-channel approach to the gambling industry and he believes the approach is starting to bear fruit. At the company’s interim results, Topping revealed that cross- selling across product lines is working, with more William Hill Online cus- tomers using the betting shops and more gaming machine users placing bets over the counter (OTC). Topping commented that the company is not just online operations and a retail business: “We’re a mixture of all four; retail, online, telephone and mobile; which makes it even more important we’re the best we can be in all those channels. Let’s just look at what we can get if we exploit the multi- channel approach. First of all, you get a better customer loyalty. 84 per cent of our customers use us most often. For our nearest competitor that’s 74 per cent.
“The foundations of the brand have always been in a retail operation. They still are but it’s not a one way street with online simply benefiting from the brand reputation by retail. Rather, we see here how retail itself can benefit from the cross promotion.”
One way of doing this was the launch of the Cop the Lot slot game that was distributed across online and the machines simultaneously with cross promotion. The game has achieved higher than normal results in both channels. Topping said: “I’ve talked about betting and gaming for a long time, not just being a betting company but being a betting and gaming company and I’ve emphasised our customers don’t see retail as OTC versus machine. “The online statistic continues to
grow, with almost half our online cus- tomers now using more than one product. Two thirds of the machines’ customers also bet over the counter. Now this is interesting, there are size- able percentages of customers who bet online with William Hill who also come into our shops to place bets. Our rivals just don't see that level of crossover. We have a really strong brand and that facilitates that, as well as the offering. It’s true of gaming too.” Topping maintains that pricing is still key to good bookmaking and appeals to customers and that some of his firm’s competitors are not dealing with the reality of the market. “We are a mass market bookmaker, and we’re also realistic bookmakers. I would call us real world bookmakers. How do you recognise a real world bookmaker when you bump into him in the betting shop? Real world bookmakers know
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not all World Cup turnover is incre- mental. They know that punters like prices rather than loyalty cards. Real world bookmakers also see what they see, not what they want to see. And when people know you’ve got value prices and you lay those prices, they keep coming back. That’s just good competitive sense.” However, Topping also recognised
that William Hill is not a leader in all areas, although he is keen to get up to speed in mobile gambling. He com- mented: “We’re definitely in catch-up mode in mobile but we’re catching up very, very quickly. Everyone and their uncle has jumped on the mobile band- wagon. Everyone now sees which way it’s going. But actually my view is not everyone understands the punter. It’s not just enough to take the existing product - sportsbook casinos and turn them into an app. That’s not what mobile’s about. “To the punter, mobile betting is about instant information, constant access to more opinion and data than they’ve ever had before. That’s actually why we went down the Racing Post [partnership] route. The definitive information source for the horse racing punter is the Racing Post app, with a route straight into William Hill for betting and William Hill only for betting, and more than £1m bets taken in the first six months from a standing start. We’ve also revamped our mobile sportsbook, in our view, it’s the best in the market.”
RALPH TOPPING: ‘I WOULD CALL US REAL WORLD
BOOKMAKERS’
Sports still pressin
Despite the billions of pounds that the industry provides s Coalition has claimed gambling operators are ‘economic
FUNDING S
ports look set to press their claims for more money from the gambling indus-
try in the UK Parliament as the Culture Media Sport Select Committee begins its inquiry into the Gam- bling Act.
The Sports Rights Owners Coalition (SROC) has wasted no time in claim- ing that it deserves money from the betting industry in order to guard against cor- ruption and also as a payment for its intellectual property in the shape of a ‘betting right’.
In its submission to the Select Committee, the SROC commented: “Pro- tecting sports competitions from any unauthorised commercial exploitation would also enable organis- ers to determine which aspects of the event may be
the legitimate subject of betting and thus reduce the risk of match-fixing and fraud. Sports betting opera- tors should have to pay competition organisers for their ability to offer bets on the sport, some of which revenues may be used to help finance the fight against match-fixing and some of which could also be re-distributed to amateur sport.” Amazingly, SROC also claims that gambling oper- ators giving nothing back to the sports is an act of ‘economic free-riding’. Online operator
Bwin.party has moved to refute that claim immediately: “Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the online gaming industry does not threaten the funding of sport, it is in fact a major contributor to European sport - the licensed gambling industry
contributes an estimated 3.4bn euro (£3.0bn) per annum to sport alone with 2.1bn euro (£1.9bn) con- tributed by private gam- bling companies.”
SROC makes much of the fact that a betting right has been introduced in France as part of the country’s recent liberalisation of gambling laws, but
Bwin.party suggests that the concept has a high number of unintended con- sequences.
The firm said it has
resulted in a smaller and less competitive betting market, with regulated operators being forced to offer less attractive odds as the implementation is rather complex and costly. “Each licensed sports betting operator needs to negotiate the payable fee separately with each French sports event organ-
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