How Entain Is Building CRM for the Organic Growth Era

The Problem 

Entain, one of the world's largest betting and gaming groups, grew through acquisition during a period of market consolidation. When consolidation completed, growth had to come from the value of its existing players, a shift from acquisition to retention. That required a CRM function Entain had never built. 

Those acquisitions built a major portfolio in gaming. BetMGM in the US, Ladbrokes and Coral in the UK, Foxy and Gala, and a presence across Europe and South America. The model that assembled it was inorganic growth, acquiring brands and amalgamating them onto a common core wallet, and with every acquisition came more systems. Shifting to organic growth meant asking that inherited estate to do something it was never designed for. 

Four things stood in the way. 

1. Technology. Entain's systems were custom and expensive to maintain, but cost was not the main issue. They were brittle and inflexible, and the business could not change them quickly enough to keep pace with the market.
2. Cycle time. Not a question of headcount. The constraint was how long the work took. As Simon Gatenby, Martech Transformation Director at Entain, put it: "It cannot take you five days to set up a campaign if you want to operate in this model. Needs to take you five minutes."
3. Zero customer focus. Multiple product portfolios, numerous P&L owners each wanting to reach the same customers, and little governance over what went out. The environment was, in Gatenby's words, fairly chaotic, and benchmarked against competitors in other markets, the volume of communication could be pretty terrifying.
4. Innovation. A complex commercial and operational environment combined with difficult underlying technology meant that anything requiring the full loop, from ideation through targeting and execution to measurement, could not be executed. There was no environment in which to innovate. 

"It cannot take you five days to set up a campaign if you want to operate in this model. It needs to take you five minutes." 

— Simon Gatenby, Martech Transformation Director, Entain 

The Decision 

Entain's challenge was never only technical. CACI, an Optimove strategic partner, ran the discovery. It covered the platform architecture, but also the CRM team's processes and the campaigns customers were actually receiving. As David Delbridge, Director of Marketing Technology at CACI, framed it, the challenge was operational, it was strategic, it was really the overall approach to CRM. 

The recommendation was to centralize CRM decisioning in Optimove and integrate it properly with the rest of Entain's ecosystem, including the internal systems that issue bonuses and promotions. 

That second half is what makes gaming different. When Optimove decides a player should receive a free bet or a free spin, the decision has to reach the player, and it has to reach the bonusing platform that will honor it. Without that, the customer is told about an offer they cannot redeem. At Entain the integration was not yet in place, so every campaign meant building the same audience twice, in two systems. The process was manual by necessity. Automation at scale, let alone AI, was not possible. 

Closing that gap is what Delbridge says unlocked automation and AI at scale, which the team then worked to deliver. 

Four Lessons from the Rollout:

1. Simplify Ruthlessly, End to End 

Half-measures do not pay off. The instinct with a program this size is to sequence it by capability: one channel first, the others layered in later. Entain rejected that and launched a set of customer groups end to end, because the case that needed proving was the end-to-end one. 

"Don't pick one part of the problem would be my advice. Pick the end-to-end problem and deploy something that solves the whole problem, because the challenges of integration far outweigh any disadvantages you might have." 

— Simon Gatenby, Martech Transformation Director, Entain 

The payoff Gatenby names is not customer experience. It is the time lost as work passes between party A and party B, system A and system B, which he calls a really crappy employee experience. Removing it is liberating, and the proof is mundane: walking in front of the UK MD, iPad in hand, and answering how the campaigns went yesterday. 

2. Executive Sponsorship is Key 

CRM transformations meet a specific resistance. Technology teams do not want to unwind years of bespoke systems they think are good. Operational teams are already overwhelmed by a complex sporting calendar. Everybody has an opinion about CRM without engaging in the detail. Parts of this, Gatenby says, could be described as the project nobody wants to do. 

"My boss is the chief commercial officer, and my other boss is the CTO and CPTO. They both have it on their objectives to deliver this program this year, because I made them write it there." 

— Simon Gatenby, Entain 

3. Prove It Small Before You Scale It 

Declining to sequence by capability is not the same as declining to phase at all. Entain runs multiple brands across multiple regions, so bwin UK went first, carrying both the new blueprint and the new way of working with Optimove. 

Phasing is not only about proving the technology. Optimove is a broad product set, nobody knows the entire suite, and some of what you try will not quite work the way you want on your platform. 

"The phasing part of that approach gives you the license to fail on a smaller part of it, so you can reinvest and rework and go again." 

— Simon Gatenby, Entain 

Gatenby expects to repeat the pattern with each brand that goes live. bwin UK did two jobs at once: it proved the technology, and it proved the new approach was more efficient and more commercially effective than what came before. 

4. Know Where the Algorithm's Judgment Ends 

The hardest part of the work was never the statistics. 

"There are gazillions of companies in the betting and gaming industry and beyond who will build you models to make recommendations on what you should sell your customer. And I promise you that is the easy bit. That's just statistics." 

— Simon Gatenby, Entain 

The hard bit is the engineering mile through the whole marketing life cycle. What OptX does, he says, is close the last mile that other vendors forget: getting the content in front of the customer, content technology flexible enough to absorb the data across different creative and textual treatments, and the measurement. 

He is equally direct about the limits. Algorithms need learning phases, and leaving one alone long enough to learn is as much an organizational problem as a technical one. The model does not know a new product has launched or that the bonus money has run out, and it cannot see competitor behavior, margins, or bonus constraints around an event like the Cheltenham Festival. 

What it has solved is gaming and content recommendation: scraping content off the site, interfacing with the events hierarchy, running the journey end to end to bet placement. AI, as he puts it, is not a fortune teller. Pick the problems it can solve and cope with the ones you know it will not. 

Built for Continuous Evolution 

The bwin UK deployment is the first of many. Entain is now extending the same blueprint, and the same use cases proved in that first release, to its other brands across the UK, Europe, and beyond. Gatenby points to the working relationship with Optimove's team as part of what makes that extension possible. 

"Their CSM model is a genuine CSM model, where you can ring the guys up and get through to people, and they engage with you and know their product." 

— Simon Gatenby, MarTech Transformation Director, Entain 

Bonus and promotion management, one of the harder integration problems Entain still has to solve fully, remains on the roadmap, and Gatenby's team is watching it closely as the rollout continues. 

The Bottom Line 

Entain's transformation is not finished, and Gatenby says as much. But the shift already underway shows what happens when a CRM function stops treating technology, operations, and governance as separate problems to solve one at a time. For any CRM leader inheriting a complex, acquisition-built stack, the lesson is not to wait for a perfect plan. It is to simplify ruthlessly, secure real sponsorship, prove the model on one brand, and let the data do the parts of the job it is actually good at.