Kindred Group

• Kindred Group, acquired by FDJ in 2024, focuses on keeping millions of players safe while offering a thrilling entertainment experience across all unique brands.

• Marketing transformation improved customer engagement and visibility of its gambling products (sportsbook betting, casino, bingo, and poker) across 9 brands and 17 markets

• I served as a Head of Customer Decisioning, Reporting to the Director of Marketing Intelligence and seeking advice directly from the Chief Marketing Officer.

• I expanded this role beyond the original job profile of a Decisioning Subject Matter Expert.

Key Responsibilities

• Deep understanding of business strategy, financial constraints, and commercial drivers

• Led strategic implementation of next-best-action (NBA) based marketing campaign automation using a modern marketing stack

• Led Vendor and partner selection process including RFP, evaluation, and commercials

• Managed Integrations across Tealium, Pega, Movable Ink, Bannerflow, AirShip, Taxi & SendGrid in support of personalised campaigns scaling it up to 9 brands and 17 global markets

• Programmatic activations on social & DSP for re-targeting

Key Achievements

• £6M+ projected revenue per campaign from a suite of next-best-action capabilities

• 6x ROI in Year 1, meeting marketing programme transformation goal of improving customer engagement

• 25% OPEX savings by switching implementation partner after due diligence, achieving better delivery outcome, high-quality work with quicker turnaround, diverting budget to strengthen business engagement and operations

• 24x7 monitored offshore operations with incredibly fast problem resolution and campaign result reporting. The team monitored the campaigns for late evening match runs, weekend matches, and platform health

Key Responsibilities

• Created a global team with robust processes, for successful deliveries and operational autonomy

• Encouraged productivity by agile ceremonies, sprint planning, scrums, SoS, retrospectives, monthly all hands, regular reporting, staff 1:1s, NBA forum & centre of excellence

• Improve teams’ productivity and quicker time to market by automating tasks

Key Achievements

• Interviewed, Coached & Led 25 skilled people across 5 focussed manager-led teams consisting of own campaign delivery specialists and 3rd party staff 

• Teams managed:

  • Pega Capability & Framework squad (DCS, 1 Manager + 4 staff *upto 6 during transition*)

  • Pega Business-as-usual squad (Kindred, 1 Manager + 2 staff)

  • Tealium Business-as-usual and Operations Squad (TCS, Kindred, PSC & Theorem, 1 Manager + 5 staff)

  • Operations & Technical Support squad (Kindred + TCS, 1 Manager + 5 staff)

  • Quality Assurance squad (DCS + TCS, 1 Manager + 2 staff)

Key Responsibilities

• Planning, roadmap, delivery, and operations of Omni-channel digital marketing systems:

• Collaborated with stakeholders across departments such as commercial marketing, retention & acquisition, digital content and creative, contact centre, data, engineering, and analytics for business focussed deliveries, challenging ineffectiveness, and proposing solutions, to deliver data driven MarTech strategies and tool selections

• Implemented industry best practices to set ways of working eliminating silos, managing risk and mitigating disruptions

• Optimised Targeting & Media Spend using CDP: Web Data Capture, Profile Stitching, Audience Segmentation, and Programmatic Activation on Social (Meta Facebook, SnapChat), and DSP (Google DV360, Adform & Xandr) platforms

• Ensured Customer data privacy, marketing preferences and jurisdiction licencing compliance are adhered to using a robust contact block policy and escalating audit on lapses

• Measurement of campaign effectiveness such as engagement through click-through rate increases & financial uplift

• Organised optimal use of environments for Pega Business Operations, Simulation, Campaign Reporting Dashboard, Scalability Performance Tests & Upgrade assessment to Pega Infinity

• Tools used: Monday.com, Jira, Confluence, Adobe Analytics, Power BI

Key Achievements

• Enabled 5 Personalisation channels - integrated with Pega & Tealium

  • Inbound

    • Web Banners, served via BannerFlow

    • Onsite Messaging, served via Digital channel team

  • Outbound

    • Email, served via SendGrid

    • Push Messaging, served via AirShip

    • SMS, served via SendGrid

• Delivered 5 Personalised Outbound Campaigns - Men's Word Cup, Women's World Cup, Tier 1 Football, Sport Bulletins, Casino Bulletins, with top ranking matches, cross-sell & upsell to generate excitement & engagement Optimised customer engagement with outbound campaigns across multiple channels, leading to personalization and increased revenue in Men’s & Women’s World Cups, Weekly Newsletters for Tier 1 Football Leagues, Weekly Sports & Casino Bulletins, by providing personalised engagement using templated reusable actions & treatments

• Extensively used Adobe Analytics reporting to analyse customer traffic activity from previous match seasons, and suggested a spec of 600 Batch Decisions per second and performance tested them, which neither the vendor nor partner were able to uggest.

• Advocating greater use of technology shared across Business (Acquisition, Retention, Customer Services) and Engineering

Key Responsibilities

• Relationship management with vendors (Pega, Tealium), partners (Merkle, DCS, Tata) and agencies (Purple Square, Theorem) to pursue return on investment.

• Owning P&L for the Customer Decisioning department

• Evaluated 4 decisioning services partners with leadership connects on governance, implementation & commercials.

  • Merkle 

  • DCS

  • Areteans

  • Futureproof AI

  • (BlueRose Technologies and EAISystems were also evaluated but had to be excluded due to their specialisation gap)

• Evaluated 3 CDP vendors with leadership connects on requirement, features, POC & licencing costs to find the most cost-effective CDP.

  • Segment

  • High touch

  • Zeotap

  • (Rudderstack was also evaluated but there was limited interest from the vendor)

Key Achievements

• Budgeting software & platform licences over £2m p.a., optimising costs when objectives have been achieved

  • Got agreement in principle with Pegasystems that there will be no additional charges on customer volumes after reviewing that the contract was vague yet allowed higher customer volumes, saving excess usage fees of over $100k in Years 2 & 3.

  • Decommissioned Pega Production Mirror after finding underutilisation, saving $250k per annum

  • Got Tealium enhanced support agreement with weekend support in place by meeting their CEO, Senior VP and Senior Direct in their London offices, utilising $25k fully.

• Negotiating statement of works (SOW) and contracts over £2m p.a., service agreements, rates & resourcing.

  • Hard-negotiated day rates with Pega system integrators, gaining up to 25% cost advantage.

    • Included Client Partner at no cost, which was charged at max rate by the previous SI, saving $30k per annum

  • Got more value from the system integrators by adding no-cost lead consultants from TCS to the team to ensure their continued business in Year 1.

    • No-cost Pega Offshore Lead, worth $20k per annum

    • No-cost Tealium Offshore Project Manager, worth $20k per annum