Clickety click: Buzz Bingo on how online innovation can help attract a younger audience

As we approach five years since Gala Bingo underwent a £40m transformation to turn the business into Buzz Bingo, it does so with a new man at the top. This changing of the guard occurred at the end of 2022 when then-CEO Chris Matthews announced he was stepping away from the bingo industry and handing over the reins to the firm’s COO of digital, Dominic Mansour, who was approaching two years with the multi-channel operator.

On his departure, Matthews was confident it was the right time for a change at the top and that he’d found his natural successor. At the time, Matthews said: “I do believe that with the company now profitable after the Covid-19 shutdown and digital growing rapidly, the timing couldn’t be better to hand the baton over to an excellent candidate like Dominic.”

Buzz Bingo recently launched Buzz Casino, a new website dedicated to online casino, as the business looks to expand its scope of operations. The platform provides players with slots, table games and live casino content and was designed in-house in collaboration with Playtech.

Mansour, who previously served as CEO of Bragg Gaming Group and MD of Full Tilt Poker, talks to EGR Intel about the transition, his priorities when he took the hot seat, as well as how the bingo industry bounced back from the Covid-19 pandemic.

EGR Intel: How have you settled into the CEO role, and can you tell us what your main priorities have been?

Dominic Mansour (DM): It’s been an interesting ride to settle in, if I’m honest. I’ve been with the business just over two years now and I know the sector pretty well, having been in it for over 20 years. My real focus has been getting us back on the right footing. This business needed a lot of help, and my main objective is to get us back to a position of profitability and growth.

To start with, we had to do the right business performance analysis and try to look at where the potential is. Then, as well as this, we have the macroeconomic situation that you’re trying to digest at the same time, whether that’s just the trends in the industry that have been pretty tough or for the sector specifically.

I’ve also enjoyed spending time in our Buzz Bingo clubs, talking to customers and colleagues and trying to better understand the lay of the land.

EGR Intel: It’s been almost five years since the rebrand to Buzz Bingo, and the core element of it was to appeal to a younger audience. Has this aim been achieved?

DM: It is easy to see now as the new customers we are acquiring online are way younger than the average customer in the club. On average, in the club, a customer’s age is mid-to-late 40s, but the new customers we have trying bingo for the first time are in their 30s, which is really encouraging. We have focused on the fun of bingo and creating interesting community experiences. We’ve had success running events in the club and introducing younger players to the idea of bingo in various forms and through digital
products like live bingo, bringing more engagement to digital bingo experiences that are brought to life in an easily accessible way and leveraging our years of experience hosting people in venues.

EGR Intel: How much has the online vertical grown since the pandemic, and what are the core reasons behind this?

DM: While the pandemic gave the online business acceleration to its previous growth rates, it’s in the last 18 months or so that we have seen our online channel accelerate from a net gaming revenue (NGR) perspective, as we have refined and improved our internal operations and CRM along with our product diversification – introducing a new iOS app, evolving our website, continuously improving the player experience, developing our chat stars and live bingo hosts, and being steadfast in our priorities and putting customers first.

We’ve grown profit by 50% by sticking to our guns and being brave in our innovation, improving retention and creating new revenue streams – live bingo specifically has increased profit beyond our wildest expectations.

EGR Intel: How do you keep customers playing in such a crowded market?

DM: Everyone in the industry has been using the old-school CRM system, and we’re all pretty good at it. I won’t sit here and say we’re better or worse than our competitors, but, in my opinion, innovation drives loyalty and revenue. That is why we have put a lot of effort into developing live bingo to make ourselves stand out. The numbers that have come off the back of that prove that’s the case. I think that’s where we want to focus our energy and attention for the rest of this year.

EGR Intel: What specific product innovations has Buzz Bingo launched in recent years that are driving acquisition and revenue?

DM: Live bingo has been a key initiative. Our live broadcast technology has achieved very low latency so our presenters can interact with bingo players in real time, creating a truly live experience, whereas competitors have been broadcasting live on a delay. I love that Buzz can truly put bingo at the heart of the action, which has helped us drive market share and attract players from clubs.

Live bingo allows us to add features and side games to bingo games via the video feed, which means the developments to the game can be trialled and rolled out in days and weeks via our teams rather than months of development to the bingo client, plus we can easily echo features from our clubs and sync up club bingo sessions with the online product.

We have started trialling what live streaming means for us as a business with bricks-and-mortar clubs and an online presence and how it might link our bingo experiences. In-club, we continually innovate by trialling new bingo variants and new bingo-ticketed events. Our slots business, both online and in-club, has been very quick to respond to new products in the marketplace and keep our portfolio fresh and interesting to players, particularly in terms of creating community play through tournaments in both parts of the business.

EGR Intel: The UK economy is facing pressure from high inflation and rising interest rates contributing to a cost-of-living crisis. How has this impacted playing habits and spend of your online customers, and have you noticed players tightening their belts or playing less?

DM: You would have thought so, and we’ve budgeted and modelled that it would happen because of inflation, the energy crisis and the cost of living. But the truth is that spend per head is pretty much flat year on year. So, we’re pleased because it’s ahead of what we have budgeted, and, in my personal view, we are coming out the other end. So, hopefully, it won’t be long until we see interest rates coming down and inflation drop slightly.

EGR Intel: How do you use your venues to your advantage over digital-only rivals, especially with omni-channel efforts?

DM: Bluntly, only Mecca can do the same thing as us from a bingo perspective. The sports betting companies have the same omni-channel presence. What omni-channel does is give you several assets the single-channel operators don’t have.

The first is customer trust. The value of these multi-channel customers is much higher than those in a single channel. The cost of acquiring them in both directions becomes cheaper because you’ve got more mechanics to acquire them. Once you have acquired them through a channel, you can cross-sell them into another.

We look at a customer from the perspective that we don’t care how or where they play so long as they play with us. If they play online, we want it to be with Buzz Bingo. If they play in a club, we want it to be in a Buzz Bingo club. That’s essentially our philosophy around the omni-channel business.

EGR Intel: You partnered with Playtech in order to create a single digital wallet for retail and online use. How is this type of integration helping?

DM: These are the sort of foundations that are truly unique to us. You could win £10 on a slot game online and buy a beer with it in a club; it is that unusual setup and ecosystem of keeping it all within the family. The single wallet is one of the omni-channel initiatives that we’re working on and, going forward, we are looking to build on these kinds of foundations.

EGR Intel: Has customer attraction and retention altered since joining forces with Future Anthem last year to help personalise the player experience?

DM: I love what those guys are doing. All that kind of tech is right up my street, and I was very excited to see what they were up to. For example, at a player level, the technology can read that a certain type of game would trigger churn of a new customer, and therefore it wouldn’t show them that game. So overall, it helps us deliver a better customer experience, and that’s what it’s all about; the loyalty and the retention you get off the back of it should be considered a side benefit.

EGR Intel: Buzz Bingo offers slots and casino games like most bingo operators. Do you actively look to cross-sell players into these more lucrative games or do they merely serve to complement the core bingo offering?

DM: We always put bingo first. Organically, some customers cross-sell themselves into one of the other verticals offered on the site. I think it’s important that we keep bingo at the heart of what we do otherwise we will naturally evolve into a casino.

That was the exact reason why we made a casino – so we have a standalone offering to appeal to a different audience, and we can promote it under the Buzz umbrella as Buzz Casino. For the most part, casino players tend to get the casino offers, and bingo players get the bingo offers. We rarely try and push one in the other direction and vice versa.

EGR Intel: Some industry observers have questioned why online bingo sites are legally allowed to advertise on British TV all day (casino is only permitted after 9pm) yet most offer and heavily promote casino products on their sites. What do you say to those who think pre-watershed bingo advertising shouldn’t be allowed?

DM: It’s a fair point. Bingo is very recreational and our customer base is way more recreational than a standalone casino. So, we reduced our max stake in 2021 to reflect the behaviour of our recreational low-stake gamblers who respond positively to safe and low-risk gambling products. This naturally creates a recreational customer base, which is why the regulations are where they are. It’s to avoid pushing harder forms of gambling in front of people who shouldn’t be exposed to them, like children.

EGR Intel: What systems have been implemented to mitigate the impact from the white paper? And what expectations are you putting on its impact?

DM: We don’t want to speculate about what may or may not be included in the white paper so, from that perspective, we will continue to operate and run the business as normal, which means putting customers first, and we will adjust things as regulatory change is proposed. The white paper itself is only the first step in the reform of gambling legislation change. That said, as an operator in the softest sector of gambling, we have a very recreational customer base and we’ve taken many steps to protect players. For example, we don’t cater for high-value so-called VIP customers, rather focusing on higher volume, lower value players. For example, this is reflected in the fact we have a low max stake already online of £10, which is lower than pretty much the entire industry.

EGR Intel: What is the outlook for the rest of this year for Buzz Bingo? Will we see any further developments in your online product?

DM: One pressing objective is the full business restructuring, which we aim to complete by the end of H1 2023. In the year’s second half, our attention will turn to online. What I mean by this is the rollout of more of the features that our partner Future Anthem has developed for us and tying that tech closer to retail so our retail customers find it easier to play online.

Also on our radar is to look at more product verticals outside of our recently launched casino, or maybe even secondary or tertiary brands that might sit under a different name altogether.