The necessity of building and maintaining a strong network is a familiar construct among numerous industries, and is certainly one that is not lost in the gaming community.
However, among the multitude of strategies and expert tutorials on how best to achieve such a goal, is there question of: how much do you know about your network? With this in mind, CasinoBeats is aiming to take a look under the hood, if you will, and has tasked the 100 Club to help out.
Allan Petrilli, VP of Sales & Growth at Intelitics, is the latest person to join the CasinoBeats Pathways hot seat as he reminisces on his journey in the gambling sector with CasinoBeats Senior Journalist Conor Porter.
CasinoBeats: Could you begin by talking us through any past experiences that have been gained outside of the gambling industry? Could your career have taken any different paths?
Allan Petrilli: So non-ironically I actually started my career in sports. I graduated University in 2009 prior to that I worked in the Canadian football league for the Montreal Alouettes who actually won a handful of championships while I worked there as an intern as an events coordinator. So I started my career there and really loved it, thinking that I’d probably work in sports for my entire life.
When I graduated in 2009 I took a job at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics which was incredible. I worked at the curling venue with a handful of old colleagues from the Montreal Alouettes. I got to be in the building when Canada won the gold for curling which was amazing. I got to be on the streets of Vancouver when Canada beat the US in the gold medal hockey game so really from that point just thought sports was where it was going to be.
What was it that eventually led you into this industry?
I was looking for a job in marketing in Montreal. In Montreal you know you either work for a French organisation or an organisation that requires you to be able to communicate and write in French and although I’m born here my communication skills in French were not great.
I started looking for jobs and marketing I was to be fair a little bit limited in in what opportunities I had so I I started mass applying at companies just trying to figure out where I’d be able to get my next role and at the time I applied at a company which was publicly called Econ Access, which is now known as Income Access, not even knowing that they were involved in the gambling industry at all.
I applied for a marketing coordinator position in their affiliate marketing team. Even in my first interview it was a little bit cagey that they service igaming operators, no fault of their own. In 2011 in North America igaming was quite taboo as it was not regulated. We had just come off the heels of everything that happened kind of in the mid-2000s with the wire act.
So I went through a few interviews then you know slowly started to realise that they served as the odd gaming industry and ended up uh kind of falling face first into it and never looking back.
How would you assess your progress through the industry to date? Are there any interesting anecdotes that would interest our readers, or any standout experiences that may not have been possible without the current, or a past, role?
I think the beauty of this industry is it’s so global. A lot of other industries are focused on wherever you’re based. Obviously I’d be remiss to not talk about the amount of travel I’ve got to do since I’ve joined the industry in various roles.
I’ve obviously travelled most of Europe for the conference series that I’ve been to. I’ve travelled across the US in my role at Mundo Media, ended up in Bangkok for an
Affiliate World Conference so really got to kind of see the world on the back of some of the jobs that I’ve had over time and as someone who loves travelling I don’t know that there’s any bigger benefit than that.
What would you say have been the major changes during your time working in the industry? Both for the better and worse.
I think we’re growing up and I don’t mean that in a bad way but I think with regulation comes the need for the industry to become a little bit more serious. I’m obviously focused on user acquisition affiliate marketing tracking, which has seen incredible overhauls over the last 10 to 15 years.
When I joined the industry there were basically no ad platforms that anyone was really allowed to buy on or did they exist at the time. Affiliates were primarily SEO companies either run out of their houses or small units. Looking back to 2011, Catena Media didn’t exist. Better Collective was a running betting expert and that was what they were and if you look now they’re huge publicly traded companies driving incredible volumes of traffic globally.
I think it’s been interesting, the kind of the path that the industry has taken to scale and I think just in general we’ve become a much more serious industry to the rest of the world.
If you could ask the 100 Club any questions, or task them with tackling any issue, what would that be?
I really think collaboration in coming together as an industry to try to solve the issues that we’re facing is incredibly important. I don’t think we don’t do it but I think because we’re scaling so quickly and regulation is moving so fast everyone at the end of the day is
looking out for themselves a little bit.
I think as a group we need to look at speaking more, whether that’s directly with our competitors or groups that we’re working with and trying to push the industry forward from an innovation standpoint.
