William Hill to Push for Localization in Other Languages

William Hill is in pretty serious trouble, it seems. Once, the company was at the very top of the online bingo scene in the UK, but now they’re surprisingly seeing a flagging performance and a profit warning. Last year, the revenues from its non-core markets (which account for 12% of all of its online revenues, which is a substantial sum when we’re dealing in the millions). The gaming division saw a fall of 30% from the year before, which is unbelievable. Obviously there’s some kind of issue here, and according to analysts working for William Hill, the non-core markets have been “held back” by only offering their mobile services in English. “Longer-term, the priority is to build our teams to support these markets, both from a product and marketing perspective and beyond this ensure we are increasing the number of languages we offer across both mobile web and iOS,” Crispin Nieboer, William Hill Online interim MD, said.

But the increased availability of foreign languages on mobile platforms isn’t going to be the only strategy that William Hill is employing in an attempt to salvage its non-core markets – an increased focus on marketing in those regions is also definitely on the table, according to William Hill CEO James Henderson. In an attempt to boost performance, last year he hired former Playtech employee Aaron Johnston in the hopes that his advice would be able to bring in some profits. “Online’s performance has been a concern for me for a while and that’s why I brought in an industry expert to carry out a review,” Henderson said. Nieboer is currently working with Henderson and Johnston, as well as with William Hill’s new CIO Kevin O’Connor, in an attempt to re-evaluate the company’s marketing strategy and to ensure the firm “gets better at making the right prioritisation calls”. In addition, William Hill recently purchased two external agencies to give it an edge in the market. “The big picture, [Project] Trafalgar was the right thing to do [but] the teams needs to be bigger to take advantage of that opportunity in both the UK and the rest of the world,” Nieboer added.