Swintt
iGaming Express Interview with Tereza Melicharkova

September 2024

iGaming Express Interview with Tereza Melicharkova

You’ve had a diverse career across big iGaming companies like NetEnt, Pragmatic Play, and Relax Gaming. How have these experiences shaped your approach to marketing at Swintt?

I would say that I’ve definitely been very fortunate to work and learn at each of the companies you’ve mentioned above. NetEnt was my first step into iGaming and was a truly amazing experience that I wouldn’t know how to replace. I was part of a larger team there, so I was more focused on the events side of things than marketing, but that’s definitely helped me plan things more efficiently today!

For marketing, I probably got the most experience at Relax Gaming, where I was again very lucky to be able to work with a team of fantastic people and basically got to develop the entire marketing strategy from scratch. When Swintt came along off the back of this, I was really excited to bring what I’d learnt over with me while also broadening my knowledge in this area. It’s been a great ride so far and I couldn’t be happier with the people I get to work with.

How do you decide which partnerships will be most beneficial to your brand?

The starting point for us is always regulated markets. We want our games to be live in as many of these as possible and we always try to seek out reputable operators to partner with who share our values when it comes to things like player protection and responsible gaming.

At the end of the day, our goal has always been to ensure that customers all around the world get to experience our product, so operators who already have a strong standing or significant outreach in a market that we’re targeting are always beneficial in this respect. We’re already pretty proud of the network that we’ve built up over the past five years and we hope to expand this further as new regulated markets open up in the future. We already have some major partnerships lined up for the UK and Ontario that’ll put us on the map in these markets, so there are exciting times ahead!

Brand awareness is central to your role. What key strategies have you found most effective in positioning Swintt as a rising star in the competitive iGaming market?

From a marketing and brand awareness perspective, I think it’s really important to be present at the main iGaming exhibitions every year. When I started at Swintt, we really put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that we always had a stand and a visible presence at all of the big shows and it’s only now that we have that awareness within the industry that we can afford to be a bit more selective about where we exhibit.

That’s freed us up to place more emphasis on social media – which is really crucial to everything that we do – and do more collaborative work with our favourite PR agency, GameOn, who ensures that we’re regularly featured in interviews, roundtable discussions and other industry-focused thought leadership pieces. I think that’s all incredibly important as it not only keeps us in the public eye, but also helps people understand that we have a highly experienced and opinionated team at Swintt that knows the iGaming business inside out.

In your time at Swintt, what has been the most challenging marketing campaign you’ve led, and how did you overcome those challenges?

One big project that instantly springs to mind is revamping the entire Swintt website last year, as that was a campaign that involved collaboration between multiple departments, and we were all incredibly happy with the final product when it launched. More recently, I’d say Swintt’s five-year anniversary celebration has been one of the more challenging – but also most fun – projects that we’ve had to tackle.

We really wanted to do something that would be memorable and make a real impact with our clients, so after a lot of creative sessions, we finally settled on an idea that I don’t think has ever been done before – we created our own board game! Known as Swinttopia, the game had a big social media campaign tied to it, so it was a very broad project, but from the initial concept to the incredible finished article, everything was handled fantastically well by our team.

Sustainability and social responsibility are becoming increasingly important in iGaming. How is Swintt incorporating these values into its marketing and product offerings?

I think we’ve always been very consistent at Swintt in the fact that we consider all slots and casino games to be a form of entertainment that should be enjoyed in a safe and fun way, so it’s really important from a product perspective that we’re seen as being a responsible gaming supplier.

Of course, we always ensure that our games are certified for each market that they’re available in and are compliant with all local regulations and rules, but we also reinforce this from a marketing perspective by ensuring that responsible gaming is at the heart of every communication that we put out. This includes having branding and information about how to play responsibly on all of our social media content – as well as within the games themselves – and this is an area that we want to focus on even more in future when we begin doing more work with streamers.

As someone deeply experienced in the iGaming sector, what trends or shifts do you foresee in marketing strategies for the industry in the next few years?

I guess I already teased it at the end of my previous answer, but I really think the importance of working with streamers/influencers and having real ambassadors representing your brand is going to increase in the future. Obviously, this poses a number of challenges as you have to find streaming partners that really share the same values as you and will promote your message responsibly, but if you can get this right, you’ll have a powerful engagement tool that will bring you much closer to the end users – who are ultimately the players.

Aside from that, people that know me will be aware that I’ve been talking about nostalgic trends in the iGaming industry recently. I have a sneaking suspicion that we’ll start to see retro designs and themes making a bit of a comeback over the next few months, so this could definitely be something worth looking out for.