Same Language, Different Story: iGaming in Brazil vs Portugal, With LeBull’s Tiago Pereira

[00:00]  1. Intro: Tiago Pereira, Head of Portugal at LeBull

Host:  Welcome to Bet It Drives, the show that drives you into the unexpected corners of iGaming. How do you break into a tough market? Tiago Pereira, Head of Portugal at LeBull, did it, and he’s here to share his iGaming playbook. Tiago, thank you for coming. This is episode two.

Guest:  Thank you once again, Eugene, for the invitation. It was a real honour to be on this.

Host:  I was an exchange student back in 1993 in the States. I think you maybe underwent something similar.

Guest:  A little different, because I basically grew up there. My parents were immigrants and I went when I was two.

[00:58]  2. From the US to Portugal: adapting to a new culture and language

Guest:  I came back to Portugal at 16, not knowing almost any Portuguese, so I still say I’m a native English speaker. I had to learn Portuguese, so I struggle every once in a while.

Host:  So you have a bit of that American culture and business approach, in what you studied and how you communicate.

Guest:  100%.

[01:28]  3. From architecture to computer science to iGaming

Host:  You ended up in marketing, affiliate marketing and gambling. Is it the place you expected to be?

Guest:  That’s a funny story. Growing up I used to draw really well, and when you draw well, your parents ask what useful thing you’ll do with it. So I went to architecture, studied one year, and mid-year I thought, this isn’t for me. I switched to computer science, then started working in affiliation very early, in digital marketing, not even gambling, and I did a lot of gambling campaigns. I’m 49 now, and what’s good to tell younger people is that sometimes you don’t think you know your path, and you find it later in life. That happened to me: I kind of parachuted into gambling and just felt at home, because I’m super informal and we work in a super informal industry. Portugal is a very formal country. With my American background it was very easy for me to come into gambling and feel at home.

Host:  The industry is not going to be the same tomorrow.

Guest:  Completely different. It’s difficult too, because this is the third time I’m doing marketing for a company in the regulated Portuguese market.

[04:00]  4. Building LeBull from scratch: brand, mascot, early challenges

Guest:  For LeBull specifically, there was no background story. It’s basically a startup. I came on very early, and it was just a logotype, the bull character, with no backstory. So the first couple of months were interesting: usually you create a story, then a logo, then eventually a mascot because the brand needs it. Here it was the other way around. The brand is LeBull, and “Le” doesn’t really exist in Portuguese, but a bull is a bull. Early on, for brand awareness and trust, we took on a brand ambassador, Luís Figo, an ex-footballer. We worked with him for a year, because as a brand-new brand in a very competitive market, a familiar face helped. Figo is my generation’s idol, the one before Cristiano Ronaldo.

[05:27]  5. Why Figo became the first ambassador

Guest:  We went with that direction early on, but at some point we decided: we have the bull, he should be our brand ambassador. So since 2024 that’s the direction we’ve taken. We introduced the bull as a character last year, and we’re about to launch a campaign literally tomorrow, during SBC week.

[05:52]  6. Launching a 360 campaign during SBC week

Guest:  The timing is the first week back after vacation, the start of the school year, so people are at home with time. We’re doing a 360 campaign starting tomorrow: TV spots live during SBC week, buses with LeBull on them, out-of-home, the whole shebang.

[06:26]  7. Why SBC Lisbon is a big win for the Portuguese market

Host:  We’re not here in Lisbon by chance, SBC has moved here. How do you see that?

Guest:  It’s immensely amazing. I’ve been travelling to these conferences, London, Barcelona, Malta, for years, and having this on our home territory brings a spotlight onto the Portuguese regulated market. That’s basically why I’m here; if it were somewhere else, someone else would be in this chair. As a professional in this industry in Portugal, I have a certain responsibility. SBC has at least a five-year contract to stay in Lisbon, which is very good news for the whole Portuguese gaming industry, because a lot of companies are moving into Portugal and seeing the good conditions it offers tech companies.

[07:49]  8. Brazil vs Portugal: same language, different culture

Host:  Comparing your Brazil experience to Portugal, how different are they?

Guest:  I’ve always believed gambling companies, and really every industry, have to speak the language people want to hear. If I speak Brazilian to a Portuguese public, it sounds Brazilian, not Portuguese. When we do marketing, the story behind it has to speak to the people you’re speaking to. A campaign that works well in Portugal might not work in Brazil, because the language is the same but the cultural differences are there. Even little words, endings and accents matter, and sometimes the way you phrase something can be tremendously different.

[09:18]  9. Storytelling that speaks the audience’s language

Guest:  Good marketing directors have a sensibility for this. It’s not just numbers, it’s telling people a story they want or need to hear. Brazil, where I worked as an affiliate manager, was easy because it’s numbers: if a campaign doesn’t work, you A/B test and fix it. A marketing campaign is different, there has to be a cultural intuition. Marketing that works in Brazil, I’d say 100% wouldn’t work in Portugal, and vice versa. There might be a middle ground, but only where the cultures coincide, and that line is very thin, like the difference between the UK and the US.

Host:  So copy-pasting may not always work.

Guest:  Not always. You have to have a local marketing team that can translate or create their own stories.

[10:32]  10. Creating the LeBull Night Show room in Lisbon

Host:  You have the Night Show room that only you do. How good is it? It’s been around six months or so.

Guest:  It was an idea we had early on and were only able to do in 2025. We have a target audience of adults and young adults with a certain cultural understanding, and we thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have a place people could visit? The LeBull comedy room is inside the Lisbon Comedy Club, its own independent space. It’s not just a studio, it’s a place you can come to and see our Night Show every Monday. Everyone is free to join, you just go on our social media and say you’re in. The whole room is set up 100% LeBull, framed pictures of our bull on the wall, like a fan zone.

Host:  Has it been perceived well?

Guest:  Yes. Some of these below-the-line things don’t have a direct conversion, so they’re hard to measure, but what we wanted was to add to the story. The bull is the boss of his own room. Not everything is a click. It’s brand perception and awareness, especially having a tangible physical asset.

[12:58]  11. Turning a comedian into “the LeBull guy”

Guest:  We started this project with a then up-and-coming comedian, and today people’s direct feedback to him is “oh, you’re the LeBull guy.” Six months back people didn’t know what LeBull was, and now he’s grown into a celebrity. That was one of the ideas: have a room and an up-and-coming comedian linked to us. He’s been working with us since the very beginning and is now one of our brand ambassadors, our face. These projects aren’t simple, but they enhance your omni-channel strategy. When we started it was just a sponsorship, and a sponsorship can be like our deal with Santa Clara, just putting a logo on a shirt. We wanted something more, so everyone is welcome there, and you’ll feel like you’re in LeBull’s home.

[14:51]  12. Biggest marketing mistake: wasting budgets on “engagement”

Host:  Is there a project that looked good on paper but didn’t pay well?

Guest:  In marketing you have to really analyse what you’re doing all the time, that’s rule number one, or you’re throwing money away. Early on, as I watched social media ads come up, a lot of money was spent wrongly under the umbrella of “engagement.” Let’s create engagement, you know, and for brands that’s an error. I’ve spent over 20k a month on social media at other companies, and today I think that’s a huge mistake. Today I get more results at a fifth of the cost, because you have to understand why you have social media. For most brands it’s a communication tool with your clients. Once that’s set, you can apply ads that actually work, where people want to see your ads rather than scroll past noise.

Host:  Especially true for regulated markets.

Guest:  100%.

[16:34]  13. The Gen Z challenge and the future of social media

Host:  The biggest challenge is understanding Gen Z and the younger generation, who are completely different. Any observations on what works?

Guest:  100%. At 49, I have to trust a 24-year-old marketing executive when they tell me something works on TikTok, because it’s not for me. You have to investigate, but you have to trust their ability to sell you the idea and not dismiss it as “this is nonsense, it doesn’t work.” That’s been difficult, because I’ve always been very hands-on, but TikTok isn’t for a 49-year-old. We have to take this evolution of social media for what it is, and I’m 100% sure we’re evolving to a place where social media is dominated by AI. Everyone, not just gambling, will have to do a quick reality check soon or lose the boat.

[18:24]  14. If sportsbook disappeared: casino as the stable core

Host:  If sports betting were banned, how would you shift?

Guest:  Portugal is a very difficult market for sports betting because of the tax on turnover. There’s basically not one company that does just sports betting; everyone relies on the casino vertical as a backup to make money. We started that shift early. Up until the pandemic, it was much easier to acquire a sportsbook player and convert him to casino. Today, people are acquired by playing casino. So if we lost sportsbook completely now, it wouldn’t be as bad as it would have been pre-COVID, for all operators struggling with the turnover tax. But that scenario is highly unlikely.

[19:52]  15. When sponsorships end: shifting to ambassadors and influencers

Host:  More likely is banning sponsorships. What would that mean for your strategy?

Guest:  That’s complicated, because I believe eventually we’ll move into that. Right now maybe 11 of the 13 Portuguese league teams have betting sponsors; we sponsor Santa Clara, and others run from Betano to the rest. A ban would be a big shift, but good marketing comes down to adaptation. We love telling users we’re here, sponsoring the teams they love, but if that’s gone, I think it shifts to brand ambassadors and micro-influencers. The traditional affiliate-website model is losing traction. You’d pick people who represent your brand’s values, the same way we picked clubs that represent LeBull’s values.

[22:14]  16. Network or Not Work

Host:  Not work means you don’t like the idea, network means you do. Running a mascot for every campaign or brand, good idea?

Guest:  Network. Simple answer, yes, it works.

Host:  Copy-pasting a Brazil campaign into Portugal, even though the language is the same.

Guest:  Big no-no. Not work at all, 100%.

Host:  Outsourcing support, or keeping the first line of support local?

Guest:  All operation teams should be of the language and the culture. Network to keeping everything in Portugal, in Portuguese, despite it being a bit more expensive, because the quality when you speak to the client is much higher.

[24:08]  17. Champion mindset: lessons from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Host:  What’s your recipe for being a champion?

Guest:  That’s a difficult one. You’re probably not aware, Eugene, but I’m a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, training for about 24 years now. When you’re in martial arts a long time, you start thinking in martial arts, and one thing I’ve always thought about is continually moving forward. People make mistakes, things are out of your control most of the time, but if you keep moving forward with the mindset of “I need to get this done, it has to work out,” I think everything eventually works out. That’s been my mindset since the beginning, and it’s gotten me here. You get invited to a podcast in a car, you say yes, even if it scares you. Just keep moving forward.

[25:48]  18. Confession Lane: the hands-on leader who still did translations

Host:  When you started out, what’s one thing you never admitted back then that you’ll confess now?

Guest:  I have a lot of these. I’ve always been very hands-on. I don’t like to tell my marketing executive to do something I haven’t done myself, so I’ve done everything. If you go onto Betano today, you’ll see translations that I did. Someone at Betano told me a couple of months back that if they open the translations file, my name is there. A country manager might be a little embarrassed, but I think it’s part of my history, so I’m 100% cool sharing it. And because I’m not a fully native Portuguese speaker, I have to double-check myself, especially with Portugal’s many accents. It’s terrifying knowing there are websites I translated, but it worked out well. I finished university in Portugal, so I guess I’m okay.

Host:  On behalf of Bet It Drives, thank you for joining and being so open.

Guest:  Thank you guys as well.

[27:13]  19. Wrap-up

Host:  Tiago just showed us how to win a new market. The engine’s still warm. Stay tuned for more guests and exciting iGaming journeys. See you next time.