Our next interviewed affiliate, well, super-affiliate is Phil Fraser, who many of you probably already know personally. Phil is the owner of the biggest online bingo review site on this planet and possibly this universe. WhichBingo.co.uk is the leader of the bingo market and they recently created their first TV ad that airs in the UK. Phil is a role model to follow in this industry, look up to and strive to become at least 90% as successful as he and his business are.
Phil has since sold the business. He now works as a Business Sounding Board and be contacted at www.philfraser.co.uk.
EEG: Firstly we would like to thank you for this opportunity, we are really interested and I’m sure that all our readers are going to read this with huge interest.
Tell us a bit about yourself, we want to know who Phil Fraser really is. Where were you born? What was the key idea of developing these skills that got you so far in the industry?
The real Phil Fraser? I was born in Birmingham but my parents moved to Leeds when I was very young, so Leeds has always been my home. After three years at University in Leicester I spent 6 years in London before moving back to Leeds. Apart from one year as a trainee accountant my career before I got into the online gaming industry was in advertising; both selling advertising space and in advertising agencies. All of these roles contributed to the skillset that allowed me to launch my own business. My first role in online gaming was with William Hill where I launched their first online casino (on Cryptologic software) back in 2000. It was whilst I was with William Hill that I came across online bingo.
EEG: As far as we know, WhichBingo.co.uk is UK’s leading online bingo review site? Is this correct or is it a marketing scheme to bring all the new players…just kidding, we know about your website and love the idea and congratulate you for its developments over the years. Could you share with us how you got started with this project? What was the key idea behind it?
Whilst at William Hill we looked at getting into online bingo. This was at a time when there were only around a dozen sites in the market, and all in the grey US market. William Hill, unsurprisingly, decided that it was too early to get into the market, as well as legally unclear. However I felt that there was indeed an opportunity and left the company with the plan to raise funding to launch my own pay-to-play bingo site. Unfortunately my timing was wrong (I was too early in the UK and the dotcom bubble had just burst) and couldn’t raise the funds. However, as part of my market research, I had launched WhichBingo.com to gather player information. I added a few affiliate banners to the site and almost by accident, the business was born. At that time, back in 2000/2001 there were only a few, small bingo portals, all US-facing. We took all the best bits from each portal and put them into ours, meaning that from day one we were always the portal cumulatively with the best features. We also made our USP that we would list every single bingo site, meaning we were always the biggest directory. The first six years of the business was US-facing. When UIGEA happened, we re-focused onto the UK market and launched WhichBingo UK.
EEG: I’ve just read the article in the iGB Magazine about the re-design, congrats for the achieved work. Has it made the right and desired impact?
The redesign was driven both by user habits (ie increased mobile and tablet visits) and by Google (our site needing to be as Google-friendly as possible). In both cases we believe that we have hit these targets. The proof is in the pudding as we say in the UK and our traffic stats are now showing record levels, whilst our SERPS continue to be market-leading and improving, so we must have done something right!
EEG: In terms of ranking and quality, we can say that your website is well positioned in the industry and we like the idea of the Awards. Could you tell us how did this idea pop up? It’s really unique.
The WhichBingo Awards started life back in 2003 as simply a ‘Site of the Year’ award, was aimed at the US market and took place in December each year. To be honest I don’t remember where the idea came from. Three years later we launched the UK version of the vote. Over the years the vote developed and we added additional categories including ‘Best TV ad’ and ‘Best Promotion’.
In 2014 we took the decision to make huge improvements to the vote; we renamed it as the ‘WhichBingo Awards’, we added more categories, added a nominations round, moved the vote to May and for the first time held an awards evening where we presented trophies to all of the winners. The night was a huge success and confirmed our position as the online bingo industry’s leading awards. This year we have taken it a step further by adding a judging panel to the very important award of ‘Most Socially Responsible Bingo Operator’. The panel includes industry experts in this field from the Senet Group, GamCare and Bet Buddy. All of the details on the awards can be found at http://www.whichbingo.co.uk/awards/, as well as a video of the 2014 awards night.
EEG: WhichBingo.co.uk now has over 9,500 real player reviews. Was it hard to find players that are willing to share their experience?
Player reviews have been part of the site since its inception. Whilst peer reviews in all sorts of markets are now very in vogue it was always an important part of the site from day one. As mentioned, we list every single site in the market (there are currently 422 in the UK alone) and because of this a player can read, or write, reviews on any site they wish to. I don’t think any other bingo portal offers this feature across every single site in the market. We list sites even if we are not affiliates of them. Finding bingo players to talk about the game they love isn’t difficult !!!
EEG: We noticed that you are giving away an Apple watch to a lucky player. We’ve entered the contest as well. It is a good idea to give extra gifts to your players. Have you had good feedback on other past giveaways? Any hilarious stories?
Bingo players love competitions, and in fact, it was one of the things they asked for more of when we did some customer research. In our early years we gave away funded accounts and branded goodies from bingo sites, but we have now improved this to bigger and better items. Our sister site FreeBingo.co.uk gives away huge amounts of prizes every day (see http://www.freebingo.co.uk/blog/2015/04/march-winners/ and http://www.freebingo.co.uk/prizes/). One year on FreeBingo, we ran a ‘Christmas Hamper’ competition and, as luck had it, the winner lived not too far away from our offices so we actually delivered the prize to them. When we got there we asked for some photos which the winner was happy to have taken. Unfortunately the winner’s husband was wearing just a vest at the time and didn’t change for our photos…… and let’s just say he wasn’t a male model!!!
EEG: As the UK’s biggest bingo affiliate website, you’ve recently run your first TV ad on UK television. How fun is that? Does it give you a great feeling of achievement? I’ve just watched it and it’s really professional, we are going to add it so the readers know what we are talking about. Was is hard to achieve this perfect TV ad?
Coming from a background in advertising I knew that the key to a great advert was a great brief. We spent a lot of time writing, re-writing and crafting the brief. We also undertook customer research to find out more about our site visitors and their thinking about our site. We ran a pitch and had a number of advertising agencies put ideas to us before we made the decision on who to go with. Once we had made the decision, the process involved a lot of backwards and forwards and we were allowed to input our ideas. We even attended the production day when we recorded the voice-overs, which was fun. We’re very pleased with what we ended up with and the whole team were all sat at home, very excited, watching our TVs at 6.04am in the morning when the ad first appeared. It was a great feeling to see our brand on TV, and even better when a few days later I received a call from my father saying that he had just seen it whilst watching a programme!
You can watch the TV ad here:
Our favourite programmes are the ones that send us the biggest cheques!! But seriously our favourites are the programmes and Affiliate Managers that communicate with us; they send updated content (without us asking for it!), they keep us informed about new promotions, they respond when we ask for information and most importantly they are open to new ideas whether that be promotions that we might suggest or different commercial terms. As the market leader we are always looking at new ideas but some Affiliate Managers are restricted in their thinking and simply are not open to anything other than rev share/CPA and banners. The good Affilliate Managers also make time to meet us, whether that be at a conference or simply a one-on-one meeting.
EEG: As for now the readers have probably made an idea of who Phil Fraser and WhichBingo.co.uk are all about and they certainly they will be looking to contact you. Where can they contact you?
I can be contacted at [email protected]. And you can also find me on Twitter (@mr_online_bingo), on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/philfraser) and G+ at https://plus.google.com/+PhilFraser/. I’m also active on GPWA and to a lesser extent CAP.
EEG: Alright, here comes the fun part….favourite food, where would you like to travel in Eastern Europe, some part of the region maybe that you haven’t visited yet and favourite destination around the world.
My favorite food will depend on my mood, but usually a Chinese or Indian. However I do like ‘fine dining’ and love visiting upmarket restaurants. My wife and I recently ate at a restaurant in Leeds called ‘The man behind the Curtain’ which had the most exquisite 12 course tasting menu.
Apparently my mother’s side of family comes from Poland so it would be nice to visit the town where my roots are from. We haven’t yet visited Auschwitz and will do at some point, as should everybody. I’d love to visit the major capitals like Moscow, Budapest, Warsaw for their culture and history. As a Leeds United fan I’d be happy to visit ANY town in Eastern Europe for a Champions League or Europa League game but that is a looooonnnng way off at the moment!
My two favourite destinations are Hillside Beach Club in Fethiye in Turkey (heaven on earth – check it out) and Nerja in Spain where we own a property.
EEG: Where wouldn’t you want to travel in Eastern Europe?
Probably anywhere that has civil unrest going on at the time. Having said that we went to Egypt on holiday in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring!
EEG: What is your opinion about EEG(Eastern European Gaming – eegaming.org)?
I have to say that I wasn’t aware of EEG until recently but having taken a look around the site it looks very informative and professional. It’s well laid out and is user-friendly. If we were to ever expand into Eastern Europe it would definitely be my first port of call.
EEG: Thank you for this opportunity and have a great one!
