Dominic Mansour on Bingo, Omni-channel and Not Letting Pride Block Success

[00:00]  1. Welcome to the Power Seat

Host:  Welcome to the EGR Power Seat, brought to you in association with Pragmatic Play. Now, on to the show. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Power Seat, where we talk to the leaders behind the Power 50. Today we are joined by Dominic Mansour, CEO of Buzz Bingo. How are you doing, Dominic?

Dominic:  Very well, thanks Dan. Thanks for having me on.

[00:50]  2. A 25-year career, and how it led to Buzz

Host:  Let’s start with a look back at your career and your journey to heading up Buzz Bingo.

Dominic:  This is frighteningly my 25th year in the sector, and I had a small career before that in online marketing when the dot-com world was booming. The first half was in smaller businesses; I actually started a bingo business from scratch with some private investment, which we later sold to NetPlay TV. Then I switched to the larger corporate PLC world. Before Buzz I was running Full Tilt Poker and a big chunk of the PokerStars business, then went to run what soon became Bragg, listed on the Canadian and NASDAQ exchanges, before joining Buzz right in the middle of COVID, which was wonderful timing as you can imagine.

[01:51]  3. Why bingo: the unloved, community game

Host:  You’ve been in and around iGaming and casino. What attracted you to the bingo world in particular?

Dominic:  It’s a weirdly unloved world and one of the smaller parts of the global gaming market, but it’s a great entryway for cross-selling to casino products. The thing I’ve always liked, especially the real-life side, is the community element. It’s a lifestyle thing, very soft, and it’s pretty much impossible to have a gambling problem with bingo. The nature of the game forces it to end, so people can’t get stuck chasing losses, and in retail when the game finishes you go home because they shut the doors. Even online, the first thing we did back in 2001 and 2002 was build chat rooms to let people talk to one another, which was quite innovative in its day.

[03:10]  4. Is bingo misunderstood?

Host:  Do you think bingo is misunderstood in the wider gambling industry?

Dominic:  To an extent. It gets forgotten because it doesn’t grab headlines. Sports betting ties so nicely into the drum beat of sports news and events, so it gets that headline; bingo doesn’t fall into that category. I don’t mind that. It’s a lovely little sector, we like rowing our own boat and trying to innovate, and finally we’re starting to see some growth come back into it.

[03:59]  5. When digital became core, not an add-on

Host:  When did you believe digital was becoming a real core part of the business rather than an add-on?

Dominic:  When I took over, our digital business was actually losing money. We don’t really run it as a standalone P&L other than for budgeting; we look at it as an omni business and always have. But as a standalone it was losing quite a lot from an EBITDA perspective. We turned that around quickly, because the underlying growth was there. The cost base was a bit broken and we were over-marketing, spending too much externally, when we had something like four to four and a half million customer visits a year in retail. That is an amazing untapped opportunity to acquire customers really cheaply, and I mean really cheaply. The majority are free, or we give them 10-pound bonuses, sometimes through staff incentives, so acquisition cost is under 20 pounds. The tada moment was the lifetime value and retention of those customers compared with the ones we acquired with marketing dollars: not two or three times, but four or five times more valuable. On one end four or five times more valuable, on the other hiring them for 20 quid a pop. That’s an opportunity you cannot ignore, so we built our entire strategy around omni going forward.

[06:16]  6. The value of omni-channel customers

Host:  That omni-channel point is really interesting. Caesars has said their omni-channel customers are worth about four times as much as single-channel ones.

Dominic:  Exactly. It’s clearly a good approach.

[06:32]  7. The tech challenge: knitting it all together

Host:  It was a no-brainer, but what were the biggest challenges of moving to digital?

Dominic:  There’s a huge technical challenge behind it. The tech we inherited in retail being antiquated is the greatest understatement of all time. Some of the kit under where the caller stands was 35 years old. You’d imagine pressing the button for number 39 sends it up onto the screen, but there were 90 cables coming out of the back, each sending an electric current to make the number 39; not exactly Bluetooth. So knitting it together meant completely transforming the group’s tech stack to build a single wallet, single registration and a single loyalty programme we call Single Rewards. The app you game with online is the same app you use to access a real-life club: your membership card is in there, you scan it as you walk in. Money doesn’t buy you that; it takes time, patience and skill, with good support from Playtech, who built a lot of it. There isn’t a single moment of challenge; it’s consistent, ongoing work to keep everyone aligned on the same goal.

[08:48]  8. Leadership: on the pitch, and the Glasgow tablets

Host:  As a leader through that, what was your main role: bringing people together, or in the technical detail?

Dominic:  I saw one of your previous podcasts where the answer was about the dancefloor and the balcony. It’s a good analogy, but I prefer my football one: sometimes I want to be on the pitch. I don’t need to call the shots, I want to work hard with everyone and feel and touch it, which means visiting the physical clubs, talking to customers and just observing. Most of the game in club is now played digitally on a device that looks like an iPad. I was stood in the entrance of a club in Glasgow, and every customer walking in was pulling a device out, having a look and putting it back. You think the first one is looking for her lucky one, the one ending in a seven, but by the eighth customer I had to ask what they were looking for. A customer, not staff, told me that if the power symbol at the top is green it’s fully charged and might last the session; if it’s white it won’t. So the device that represents 60 percent of all our digital bingo bets in retail doesn’t last a session. You’ve got to see it to believe it. The data said we had 15,000 of these devices and they worked just fine, but being on the pitch and seeing it with your own eyes tells you this is a fundamental problem that needs fixing.

[11:05]  9. Customer insight: Wi-Fi and Betty’s dishwasher

Host:  What’s the most interesting thing a customer has said to you on site?

Dominic:  A few things. That tablet moment was one, and we had to change a lot of those devices. Another was very early on at a club down in Poole, where a customer came running across mid-game, swearing, to say her device had fallen off the network again. “Again” was the key word. I didn’t say anything, the general manager sorted her out, and then I asked what had happened. The Wi-Fi was a bit rubbish, and if you fall off the network mid-game it takes 15 minutes to reboot, so you miss the game, get a fresh device, log in and lose a few minutes. The insight was that the Wi-Fi doesn’t work, so you roll out a five-club Wi-Fi test and realise you have a 92-club Wi-Fi problem that will cost a couple of million to fix. On the amusing side, a general manager greeting a regular with “so, is your dishwasher fixed, Betty?” tells you how well they know each other, which is really sweet.

Host:  People pay millions for that kind of customer insight, and you get it by being there and listening.

[13:00]  10. Competing with digital-only brands

Host:  You’re competing with digital-only brands that have bigger budgets. How do you compete?

Dominic:  We have to go omni; that’s our way of competing. I don’t have the budgets the bigger players have, so we find ways to acquire customers ourselves and outperform the market, fuelled by our free retail customers. Then there’s the product play. When I was interviewing, the chairman asked my view of the website and app, and I said I had two words: me too. It was a me-too brand, we looked exactly the same as everyone else, so how do you compete when you look identical? You differentiate. Underneath it is the omni strategy, but from a product perspective you need a reason for a customer to come to you rather than Mecca, Sky Bingo or Sun Bingo. The investment in innovation has been key: Live Bingo, and Big Money Live, which links the liquidity we have in retail with our online liquidity to offer life-changing jackpots, guaranteed Buzz winners of 250,000 pounds last year. That’s where we start to stand out and compete against the bigger brands.

[15:03]  11. The live bingo approach

Host:  Live bingo is an interesting development you’re heavily involved with. What’s been your approach?

Dominic:  We debated this extensively. What we don’t do is what Evolution does with roulette, streaming a real game onto the internet that you interact with. We build a community element. Rather than a live caller reading numbers while you play on your phone, which we decided wasn’t that innovative, we essentially turned the live host into a chat moderator. In a chat room the moderator plays games and interacts, because the more they interact the more people enjoy it, and side games make it more fun. Our live host, streamed from a studio in head office or in a club, does the same: win on an odd number and there’s a special prize. It’s gone down really well; the customers who play those games are more loyal and give us more lifetime value than before we had live bingo, to the point we now run it 12 hours a day, every day. It’s a very different approach to the live-streamed products you’d usually think of in gaming.

[17:04]  12. AI dealers versus authenticity

Host:  One big development in live casino is the move toward AI dealers, with talk of 80 percent being AI within five years. Given your focus on community, what’s your take?

Dominic:  We have AI powering a lot behind the business, and I’ve seen the AI live-dealer thing; it’s absolutely ridiculous, so impressive. You could extrapolate it forward and license Frank Bruno as your live dealer, or even people who have passed away, a Jimi Hendrix dealer. That stuff is amazing, but I don’t think it’s where we’ll end up. Authenticity is what we’re trying to build. Part of why live dealer worked for casino was trust and authenticity; for us it’s about bringing the club to life. Our longer-term vision, which we are technically enabled to do, is a celebrity standing on a stage in one of our clubs calling a game, broadcast to all the other clubs on their big screens and onto a mobile phone at the same time, a truly interactive event. I’m not sure AI could do that as well, but I’m not the product guy, they’re better at that than I am.

[18:56]  13. The dream celebrity caller

Host:  Who’s your dream celebrity to do that?

Dominic:  It used to be Gary Barlow when we told the story, pictured up in Manchester, working with our core audience. Who would yours be?

Host:  Maybe Barry from EastEnders, he’s good at this sort of thing.

Dominic:  He’d hold the crowd for sure, but I think I’d stick with Gary Barlow.

[19:25]  14. SEO: there are no shortcuts

Host:  EGR gets monthly SEO analysis from Sticky Eyes, and bingo, Buzz especially, always performs really well. With Google algorithm changes and the rise of AI, how do you maintain that?

Dominic:  I’m not the techy behind it, but my experience is extensive, and what I’ve seen is so many people fail by taking shortcuts. If there’s one message: there are no shortcuts. It’s a long game, you adapt to the algorithm and stay technically ready to implement whatever each change needs to stay up there. When someone tells you they can get you into the top five in six months, three months or a week, they’re lying, and if they can, you won’t be there in a year or two. There’s a great story from 10 or 15 years ago when Party Poker thought they were the kings and fell off a cliff because of the wrong approach to gaming SEO. We’re a bit lucky too: our club presence gives us a local page for every venue across the country, and the algorithm likes that, so we have an advantage. And we choose to invest a big chunk of our marketing in that direction.

[21:26]  15. AI search as the next threat

Host:  How much is AI search a threat that complements the SEO work?

Dominic:  Massive threat is my first point. We are the kings of bingo SEO and very proud of it, and without doubt the thing that worries me most is AI search becoming a problem before we’re where we need to be, so we’re working on it right now. It’s like adapting to the algorithm, except the algorithm now says AI. Currently the volume of AI searches is really light, so the short-term threat isn’t much to worry about, but the industry, and any digital business, needs to be right at the front of it, because anything I want, my starting point now is ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot. I ask it a question, and there is your future of SEO.

Host:  It feels similar to the shortcuts point: everyone’s promising AI hacks, when really the fundamentals of good SEO just translate in a slightly different way.

Dominic:  Exactly. The AI looks at how your pages are coded differently to how Google’s search engine did, so you adapt that code so it’s picked up correctly. What you don’t do is the old trick of writing the word bingo 10,000 times in your meta tags so Google thinks that’s what you are. That doesn’t work; it’s the same rule.

[23:20]  16. Tax: remote gaming duty and UK investment

Host:  Bingo duty was abolished in April, but as an online operator you were hit by the remote gaming duty rise like everyone else. Where do you sit on all that?

Dominic:  We lobbied hard on the duty, with the Bingo Association behind it for a while, which was helpful. The remote gaming duty was a big blow, as it was to everybody. One didn’t net out the other, unfortunately, but we went through a process of mitigating the impact and have probably mitigated about half, which nets us roughly neutral versus the past because of the bingo duty benefit. I’ve never lobbied and wouldn’t profess to be an expert, but I lobbied hard, got a brilliant PR agency to help and wrote to a lot of MPs. Across the business we invest more money than we make: all of our EBITDA, every penny, plus borrowing to invest more. My letter said, if you tax us, that is money we won’t invest into the UK. We’re not an international business, we’re only in the UK, and a big chunk of the retail money goes into tables, chairs and carpets, to carpet fitters and manufacturers who are all British. Our entire supply chain is British. We look at one P&L, and whatever is left at the bottom is what we reinvest into UK plc. So a government whose agenda was flagged as growth was making decisions negative to growth, and the net effect is we pulled back on UK investment, as I assume other operators did. It frustrates me because they didn’t look at what was happening elsewhere: Holland is a perfect example, they raised taxes, tipped over the other end of the Laffer curve, and made less money.

[26:17]  17. Is the government deliberately damaging the industry?

Host:  Given the Netherlands evidence was known, some think the government is almost deliberately damaging the industry. Too conspiratorial?

Dominic:  A little. I think they’re looking for ways to justify increasing their budget, which the analysts will stand behind: increase it by this and you’ll make a billion more, tick the box. I don’t think they’re trying to hurt the industry, but I believe it’s very naive. Prohibition doesn’t work; all it does is create a black market. People talk about the black market growing, but where the conversation should start is with vulnerable people. The reason the black market booms is in large part because vulnerable people get blocked from playing on regulated sites and look elsewhere, where there’s nothing to protect them from themselves. Add the product enhancements, the bonusing and better odds those sites can offer because they pay no tax, and all you do is move more money offshore, with less investment into the UK and less tax revenue. If it’s a conspiracy theory, I think it’s wrong, but it just shows it’s naive, and I wish they would listen. The worst part, and I’ll get off my soapbox, is that another piece of analysis will say problem gambling has gone up, and the operators will get the blame, not the government, even though we are doing our absolute utmost to put the right tools in place. If problem gambling rates go up, it’s because they’re playing on dodgy offshore sites, not because of us.

[29:02]  18. The black market and bingo

Host:  How much is the black market a problem in bingo specifically?

Dominic:  Because bingo is such a soft form of gambling, I don’t think it’s a major issue for bingo itself. But slots and casino games are an important part of our business, and that’s the area where our customers get blocked, go through affordability or vulnerability checks that stop them playing to protect them, or self-exclude from casino games and then can’t play on any other regulated UK site. So where do they go? The bingo side isn’t overly concerning, but the reality is that, like all bingo operators, we make a considerable amount of our income from the non-bingo side.

[30:00]  19. Affordability checks and risk assessments

Host:  What’s your broad take on the affordability check debate?

Dominic:  They’re risk assessments, not affordability checks, let’s get that right. It makes me nervous. It’s strange that intelligent, well-educated people make decisions that ignore evidence. There’s evidence that different credit reference agencies send a different response for the same customer, and because the data access gambling operators are given is less than financial institutions get, they don’t know what the red flags are. It might be four unpaid parking tickets, and you’re red-flagged and banned from playing online. We can’t ignore that, so we’re obligated to ban the player or try to interact with them, and they never respond. The Gambling Commission says take that piece of information in isolation, but they’ve also specifically told us to look at the entirety of a customer’s behaviour, so one red flag obligates us to ban them. To me it’s a complete mess. The concept of frictionless affordability checks, where it happens behind the scenes and people are given an affordability ranking or swim lane commensurate with what they can spend, is really logical and makes sense; the final execution just hasn’t worked out like that, so it needs to be fixed.

[32:32]  20. The Gambling Survey of Great Britain data

Host:  You’ve been vocal that the Gambling Survey of Great Britain is slightly misleading and is feeding these decisions. Where are you on that?

Dominic:  All you want is consistency and accuracy in data, whether it’s the survey or your own company KPIs. When the business-intelligence team gives me a report, the first thing I do is try to rip it apart, ask lots of questions and understand how accurate it is, because data-driven decision making is at the heart of any good operation, and inaccurate data leads you to the wrong decisions. There’s a fairly consistent view that the survey’s methodology isn’t consistent, so people shouldn’t base decisions on it unless we can say it’s robust. It’s nothing personal, just let’s use the right data. The NHS report put problem gambling at around 0.3 percent of the population, and the first slug of this data was up to 2.7 percent. Logically, if it had gone from 0.3 to 0.6 you’d say it doubled, but 0.3 to 2.7, one of those is completely wrong. I’m not saying the NHS is necessarily right, but all I’d ask is that you deal with accurate, consistent data.

[34:29]  21. The best leadership advice: pride and emotion

Host:  Moving to your leadership style, what’s the best leadership advice you’ve been given, and how has it helped you?

Dominic:  A boss once said to me, don’t let pride get in the way of making money, and I adapted it to don’t let pride get in the way of success. When you stand back, what that saying really means is don’t let emotion get in the way of the right decision, because emotion doesn’t necessarily lead you well. I was reading Good to Great recently, where apparently someone bought an entire business in Italy because he had a holiday home there, and it cost him 250 million dollars. Those are emotionally driven decisions for the wrong reasons. It was great advice; plenty of people have used the phrase, but I heard it first from that boss. The emotional part of decision making needs to be stripped out, and decisions should be simple, based on data and fact.

[36:04]  22. Data versus instinct: the helicopter view

Host:  You mentioned Mattias’s balcony and dancefloor and your football analogy. How do you balance data and instinct?

Dominic:  You dip in and out. I often think of it as a helicopter view, constantly circling and looking at what’s going on. You have your daily, weekly and monthly KPIs and management accounts feeding through, and when something glows red, or a deeper shade of green, you dive into that area, go deep to understand why it’s happening, and when you’ve unwrapped it you go back up again. That’s being on the pitch for a bit, then back into the stands as the manager or coach doing the active monitoring. Data drives a lot of it, but gut instinct matters, because often the data misleads: it said the tablets worked just fine. Somewhere there was a battery-life KPI, but is that ever going to reach the table of the COO? No. So gut instinct plays an important role, and a lot of it comes from being out and about, or, if you’re digital only, talking to and surveying your own customers.

[38:21]  23. The next 12 months and the “not to-do list”

Host:  Finishing up, what does the next 12 months look like for Buzz Bingo and for you personally?

Dominic:  The last 12 have been heavy; we invested more than ever, and the results were outstanding. We grew admissions and gross profit for the first time in 25 years, a real turning point, and we’re forecasting that to continue as far out as we forecast, five years. The challenge is not getting in the way of that and making sure we can support it. You have moments where everything is going okay and it’s tempting to dive in, the helicopter bit, because you want to be active, but sometimes the best thing you can do is not do something. Back to that same book, they talk about your “not to-do list” as much as your to-do list, and I think about that a lot. At the start of the year we slowed a few things down, looked around the room, and everyone was broken. You can’t ask everyone to sprint a marathon every year, they’ll break, and we pushed really hard over the last 12 months. So we found ways to ease the pressure, to slow down a bit and maybe go faster afterwards.

Host:  A fantastic place to end the EGR Power Seat. Thanks so much, Dominic, and we’ll see you next time.

Dominic:  Thanks for having me.

[40:13]  24. Wrap up

Host:  Thanks for listening to the latest edition of the EGR Power Seat, brought to you in association with Pragmatic Play. EGR subscribers get early access to each edition; head to the website for details, and check out recent episodes on YouTube, Apple and Spotify. Until then, we’ll see you next time.