Building a 70-person marketing team and a brand strategy, with SOFTSWISS CMO Valentina Bagniya

Valentina Bagniya is Chief Marketing Officer at SOFTSWISS, the iGaming software provider. In this AffPapa interview she looks back on joining a company with no marketing department, then discusses how the function changed, why analysis should come before creativity, and why she sees brand building as the trend to watch.

In this episode

• Bagniya says she joined as CMO when SOFTSWISS had no marketing department and she was the only marketer. She hired mostly from FMCG and IT, with few people from iGaming (0:32, 1:30, 3:00).

• The idea for the annual iGaming Trends report came from the lack of reliable industry data she met while planning the strategy. The company decided to produce it for the whole industry (2:01, 2:30).

• She says marketing used to mean expo presence, simple PR and press releases. It is now a strategic function that shapes business and product development (5:02, 5:31).

• Her order of work is analysis, then strategy, then operational planning, and only then creative ideas. Basics such as PR and lead generation run all the time, with creative work usually aimed at expos (7:30, 8:00, 8:30).

• She says a Chili Pepper campaign won an EGR award in Malta and brought leads, some of which became partners. She sees influencer marketing as a short-term tool compared with brand strategy (9:31, 10:33, 11:02, 11:30).

• She says big agencies lacked B2B iGaming expertise, so the team of 70 works in-house. She names brand building as the key trend for 2025, because only strong brands survive tough competition (13:00, 14:00, 15:30).

Interview from AffPapa Exclusive Interviews by AffPapa Media, published on YouTube.