Why iGaming PR Doesn’t Follow a Playbook - and Never Will

An interview with Uliana Korobeynikova, iGaming PR and communications strategist

Uliana Korobeynikova has nine years of experience in iGaming PR and communications across content, brand strategy, partnerships, and project management. At her previous company, she built the PR function from zero: no department, no press relationships, no infrastructure at all. Within a year, the work led to 15 award shortlists, 6 wins, 300+ media mentions, and 20+ exclusive partnerships with gaming providers.

She has spoken at SBC, SNGN, Hipthers Prague, and BEGE, and was recognised in the 80 Women Leaders Shaping the Future of iGaming . She has also been nominated for three personal industry awards, and recently delivered a webinar for EEGS on Google AI Search and what its evolution means for iGaming visibility, affiliates, and brand trust.

There is no single job description for PR in iGaming, according to Uliana. In her view, it is at least five roles combined into one, something most people only realise once they are already trying to manage all five at once.

Q: Most industries treat PR as a support function. In iGaming, it often feels more like a survival tool: managing regulators, wary media, public perception all at once. How does that pressure change the way you actually build a strategy?

Uliana: When I started, there was no runway, no idea that we would scale into it, and no real structure in place. You just start building and hope you are not forced to rebuild it six months later.

People like to say “build the plane while flying it,” but in reality it’s less elegant than that. Sometimes you’re building it, sometimes you’re fixing it mid-air.

So the strategy is never a static plan or document. It becomes something closer to infrastructure - relationships, positioning, assets that exist before you need them.

The uncomfortable truth is that in iGaming, you don’t build for stability. You build for interruption. Something always changes: regulation, platform policy, market pressure. Usually on a day you didn't plan for.

Q: iGaming brands live under near-constant regulatory threat. An ad ban, a licensing issue, a new law on a Friday at 6 pm. What does real crisis infrastructure look like, and how do you build it before anything actually happens?

Uliana: You build it when nothing is wrong. Which is also exactly when nobody wants to.

And I understand that. When things are calm, crisis planning can feel like overengineering, and there is often pushback that it will be dealt with when it happens.

But in iGaming, when it happens often turns out to be a Friday afternoon.

I’ve seen something as simple as a platform policy change break a two-year content strategy overnight. Not because someone did anything wrong, but simply because the rules changed.

So the infrastructure itself isn’t complicated. It’s almost boring:

Who approves statements. How fast. Who replaces who when someone is unavailable. What gets said in the first hour - not the fifth.

But the real issue is cultural. Most teams don’t want to think in that mode until they’re forced into it.

And by then, it’s usually already public.

Q: There is a tension built into iGaming PR: selling excitement and risk on one side, responsible gambling and trust on the other. Most brands paper over it. What does holding both honestly actually look like, and does it win commercially?

Uliana: It wins. But not quickly.

And that’s where most conversations break down.

Short term, yes - aggressive acquisition messaging often performs better. That’s just reality. You see it in campaigns, you see it in spend patterns.

But it creates a kind of fragility that only shows up later.

Regulators notice. Journalists notice. Players are starting to notice more than people assume.

And when pressure comes, and it always does, there’s nothing underneath the messaging. No real position, just campaigns.

Holding both sides honestly means not treating responsible gambling as a compliance layer. It has to be part of the actual editorial identity of the brand. Otherwise it reads as decoration.

I’ve seen both approaches up close. One gets the quarter. The other gets the company a reputation it can actually stand on five years later. But not every company has the patience for a longer horizon, which is also understandable depending on what they are trying to survive at that moment.

Q: You are clear that there is no universal PR strategy in iGaming. What works for a major licensed operator in Western Europe does not translate to a challenger brand entering a new market. So when a brand comes to you and asks where to start, what do you actually tell them?

Uliana: The first thing I usually say, maybe a bit bluntly, is to stop looking for a template. There isn’t one.

And if someone is selling you one, it’s probably too simplified to be useful.

But different companies want different things. A regulated operator in Germany is solving a completely different reputation problem than a startup entering LATAM, or a B2B provider trying to get visibility in trade media.

Even the language shifts, and even the definition of success changes. The stakeholder map, the channels, the metrics — all different.

I remember one early-stage company coming in asking for visibility. When we unpacked it, what they actually needed was credibility with three very specific partners - not awareness. That changed everything.

So before tactics, you need clarity, and this is where many brands quietly struggle more than they admit.

They often have broad positioning language: “innovative,” “trusted,” “global.”

But it isn’t operational, it doesn’t guide decision-making, and it mainly exists as language that sounds good in a presentation deck.

That said, there are a few things that tend to hold across all setups.

Media relationships cannot be built under pressure; they need to exist before you actually need them. Reputation shouldn’t be an emergency function. And timing matters more than most teams expect. Trust in this industry is slow to build and very fast to lose.

Everything else depends on context. And context is usually where the real work is.

Q: One piece of advice for someone stepping into iGaming PR for the first time. Something you wish you had been told.

Uliana: Learn the product before you try to communicate it.

That sounds obvious, but it’s often skipped. And in iGaming, it shows very quickly when it is.

The ecosystem is more complex than it looks from the outside: operators, affiliates, providers, regulation layers that change from market to market.

If you don’t understand how the system actually works, you end up describing the surface, not the reality.

When I started, I spent a lot of time just listening. Sitting in on product conversations, understanding what actually drives decisions internally, and also paying attention to what journalists reacted to; not just what companies wanted to say.

Most people get that part wrong, and you can tell within the first paragraph of anything they write.

The other thing is to document everything. When you are building from zero, your wins are often invisible until you make them visible. Track the mentions, the shortlists, the relationships you are building. Not to justify your role, but because data is what ultimately earns you a strategic seat at the table and enables the next stage of growth. That seat is not given to you. You build enough evidence until it is no longer debated.

LL: Uliana, thank you for such an honest and grounded conversation. The industry needs more voices like this.