Local Irish Gaming Brands Hit Back

With the commerce press and observations styled on consolidation and the construction land-based casinos, Mrs McMillan has thought it important to highlight their know-how by setting up in the Irish market a niche internet sports betting and gaming brand.

In May 2010 Betpack was launched enabling a group of seven autonomous Irish retail bookmakers a sturdy internet betting and gaming scheme.   Operating over 183 retail shops across Ireland, these bookmakers have nearly a century of experience between, would never have launched an important internet business separately.  However, they have joined forces and created Betpack.com thus creating a retail product levelled at their internet casino audience.  In turn this has given the 7 bookmakers a strong online presence that could potentially contend with more recognized players in the Irish market.

Irrespective of the strong competition we face, we believe our performance after our inception is indicative that there is still a gap for local brands to excel in the online gambling market.

Since May, we have grown our player numbers aggressively and now have more than 10,000 players and are well on our way to exceeding our year-end targets. Our growth in player numbers and revenues has been driven by a focused online and offline marketing campaign and by activity targeting the local market where we have a retail presence.

Leveraging the bookmakers’ land – base presence – BetPack.com-branded shops find themselves in all the prominent towns in Ireland – has been the platform for our success.  In turn all 183 shops have continued to work under their own brands, we have aggressively placed the Betpack brand collateral in these shops and all seven sovereign bookmakers have been fundamental in accruing new players to our site.

The business model enables retail outlets to functions as affiliates to the website and has enjoyed a high success rate to date.  Additional advantages consist of the capacity to deposit and withdraw to online accounts over the counter in retail shops, while the brand impartiality of the individual partners gives the brand more reliability with Irish players.

With our eye firmly on the future, we endeavour to broaden our player base extensively.  So far the feedback we have received from our players has been very encouraging and that they appreciate the fact that we are a local based recognized online betting brand.

We strongly feel that the majority of our international competitors could not present such a strong, localised offering, this is indicative of a very positive outcome in our immediate future.  An admirable local brand can combat the move for consolidation in the online gaming space.