AI Future of Content in iGaming Marketing 

Interview with Martin Calvert - Marketing Director at ICS-digital

Martin Calvert is the Marketing Director at ICS-digital and ICS-translate, agencies working globally across some of the most competitive and tightly regulated industries online, including iGaming, finance, and technology. 

With experience on both the agency and client side, Martin focuses on building authority that holds up in real-world conditions, not just in search engine reports. In this session Martin will explore the applications and limits of generative AI for content creation by using AI-powered tools to facilitate human creativity, while also signposting the current limitations of AI for highly competitive, highly-scrutinised sectors.

Q: What’s the most common misunderstanding clients still have about AI content creation?

Martin: I don’t think clients have this approach but I think there can be a misunderstanding more generally about what AI content is or is not doing as part of a wider strategy.

AI is very good at producing something that looks like substantive content but when multiple brands are using the same types of prompts and not editing/improving about AI drafts at the bare minimum, they’re not really pushing ahead competitively in search or moving a customer any closer to doing anything. 

In these cases it can be things like TV, brand awareness, PR footprint, social reach and (of course) backlinks that are driving success in spite of, rather than because of, content.

There’s a lot of landfill content in iGaming now. Affiliates who are already under pressure can have a habit of ramping up volume because it feels like progress but it may not be what is moving the dial.

More than this, if carrying out multilingual/international campaigns, some brands run the risk of creating content that not even they understand and it just becomes ‘stuff’ rather than compelling content.

Q: Do you think iGaming clients are particularly drawn to AI content compared to other industries?

Martin: To an extent, and that’s partly because it is an opportunity-seeking, frequently experimental industry. It is also one in which a number of people are not opposed to taking a gamble themselves.

Combined with high competition, multiple markets, constant pressure on acquisition - of course “faster and cheaper” is appealing.

That said, this is also an industry where the details really matter so we know dozens of companies for whom regulatory compliance, brand tone, localisation, customer intent and so on are key for scalable marketing, and ultimately minimising risk/waste. 

Interestingly, you’re also seeing some brands move the other way - putting more into human-led content because they need to differentiate and maintain a footprint that actually gets surfaced properly.

Q: What do you think are the key areas that AI is transforming iGaming affiliate marketing?

Martin: I think intent-based marketing - particularly in multilingual SEO but also in customer-focused PR is where there is real scope to differentiate, be distinctive and for brands to be shown in the right places at the right time.

For that, I think AI can be very useful for campaign and customer research, structuring/planning campaigns with multiple moving parts and getting proof-of-concept campaigns live quickly to capitalise on time-sensitive opportunities, or big seasonal events like the World Cup. 

What it hasn’t really cracked is distinctiveness. A lot of output starts to feel very similar, which is not ideal in a space that is already crowded, where so much SERP real estate is already taken up by AI overviews, ads and so on. 

Used properly, AI can help good operators and good affiliates move quicker and position themselves more effectively to win that valuable space on the SERPS but it doesn’t fix average thinking/a mediocre brands/an undifferentiated SEO, PPC or content strategy.

Q: What would be the weak points of using AI in affiliate marketing? 

Martin: Samey-ness is the obvious one but also just the general idea of wastefulness - carrying out strategies that don’t necessarily have the guiding hand of human experts in a sector as highly regulated and highly competitive as igaming may mean brands go 100mph in a slightly wrong direction.

More bluntly, affiliates need a reason to exist in order to provide value to customers and gatekeepers like search engines and AI platforms.

On the same point, if everyone is using the same tools in roughly the same way, you get very similar sites and very similar content. The barrier to entry with AI is low too - an untrained person can do limited damage with other tools but AI makes it easy to be wrong at scale.

For affiliates more specifically, I think AI quality issues can exacerbate existing problems where search engines are already more likely to give rankings to operators rather than ‘middlemen’.

On the B2B side, the huge number of igaming events means that there is extra pressure to be visible online and to be planning meetings and whatnot but some of the AI-driven LinkedIn “thought leadership” that gets posted can feel bizarre. I often think people haven’t even read what they’re posting, which seems wasteful once again in such a relationship-based sector where personal authenticity has value - particularly when deals are being made between affiliates and operators.

Q: How are you adapting your approach to AI in iGaming marketing?

Martin: For us as an agency, I think customers expect us to be using AI in workflows and planning but not to be replacing the human effort/personal insights and interpretations they’re paying for.

With that in mind AI is useful for research, early drafts, speeding up certain processes and definitely creating tools/enhanced reporting and so on. 

For strategy, localisation, editing, compliance - that still needs proper attention and human strategists, writers, editors, PR professional and advertising leaders have the control.

Q: Do you agree that those who don’t use AI in affiliate marketing will fall behind?

Martin: On efficiency, yes. On results, not necessarily.

AI makes average work faster. It doesn’t automatically make it better. If anything, it can just accelerate things that weren’t working particularly well in the first place.

The gap will be between people using it as a tool, and people using it as a crutch but we can’t ignore AI’s role in how brands are being found - this is why we’ve developed Distinctiveness Intelligence as our proposition to help brands with AI search.

LL: Martin, thank you for your time and the valuable insights in the applications and limits of generative AI for content creation.