Media buying for iGaming and sports, with Betwinner's Garbis Tapacian

In the first episode of the Adsterra Podcast, Betwinner senior media buyer Garbis Tapacian talks with Adsterra's Mikhail Zhukov, head of its CPM department, about running sports and iGaming campaigns. They go through trending sports, ad formats, traffic sources, localisation and the habits that keep budgets under control.

In this episode

• Tapacian says UFC and combat sports draw strong interest in CIS and Asian markets; he advises targeting sports broadly first, then scaling whichever niche an A/B test favours (2:30, 3:00, 4:32).

• He prefers push and pop: pops need one link and redirect, while push takes more setup but is cheap in large markets, so small-budget newcomers should start there (5:32, 6:31).

• Native and display are better for branding through long-term deals, he argues, whereas video costs more and can work as performance because users engage with it (8:30, 9:31, 11:02).

• He recommends broad targeting and a mix of mainstream and adult sources at first; streaming, movie and torrent sites convert well, blogs and forums less so (13:32, 14:32, 16:00).

• On localisation, he says to test both languages in multilingual countries and use local currency in bonuses; the host adds that local-language creatives lifted conversion rates by 20-40% in Brazil (33:00, 35:01, 36:34).

• He measures click-through, signups and conversions at each funnel step, sets daily caps, uses whitelists when the budget is tight, and judges traffic by lifetime value rather than monthly metrics (29:31, 30:00, 40:00, 42:30).

Interview from Adsterra Podcast by Adsterra, published on YouTube.