In this article, Moshe Adir, Founder of Vegas Kings, argues that operators have spent years sharpening CRM targeting while overlooking a more basic constraint: the creative supply feeding it.
Ask an operator to show you the last twelve campaigns that went out of their CRM. Not the journey map. The actual assets that landed in players’ inboxes and on their phones.
I have done this dozens of times. The answer is almost always the same three banners with different copy on them.
The journey map, meanwhile, is a work of art. Behavioural triggers. Churn risk scoring. Deposit velocity segments. Someone spent months building it and it does exactly what it was designed to do. It identifies the right player, at the right moment, in the right state of mind, and then it delivers a message that looks identical to the one that player ignored six weeks ago.
That is not a segmentation problem. Too often the industry treats it as one, which is why the usual response to underperforming CRM is to add another segment, or another trigger, or occasionally another platform.
The platforms are not the constraint
The CRM tools available to operators now are genuinely good. Optimove, Fast Track, Bloomreach, Symplify, Smartico, Retention.Studio. I have watched clients build things in these systems that would have been science fiction fifteen years ago. Real-time triggers off in-play behaviour. Predictive churn models that actually predict. Personalisation depth that goes well beyond a first name in a subject line.
None of that capability is theoretical. It is sitting there, configured, licensed, paid for monthly.
And then it gets fed the same generic template that was designed for a Christmas campaign two years ago, recoloured.
The gap between what these platforms can target and what operators can actually give them to send has widened every year. Segmentation capacity has run miles ahead of creative supply. The bottleneck moved and most marketing teams have not noticed, because the platform reports keep showing beautifully constructed journeys and nobody thinks to look at what is travelling through them.
Why it happens, and it is not budget
I want to be clear that this is not operators being cheap. Some of the worst CRM creative I have seen belongs to very well funded companies.
It is a workflow problem, and the shape of it is always the same.
CRM assets are small, numerous, and constant. A reactivation email. A bonus reminder. A push notification. A VIP touchpoint. None of them individually feels important enough to escalate. Together they are the majority of every message an operator sends to a player who has already deposited.
Now look at where they sit in the queue. Behind the acquisition campaign, which has media spend attached to it. Behind the new landing page, which has a launch date. Behind whatever the commercial director asked for on Monday. The in-house designer is not ignoring the CRM manager. The designer is drowning, and the CRM request has no external deadline, so it moves to the bottom every single week.
The CRM manager needs something to send on Thursday. So they open last month’s file, change the copy, and send it.
Do that for two years and you have a player base that has stopped seeing your messages entirely. Not unsubscribed. Just blind to them.
What it is worth fixing
We rebuilt the CRM creative for a European operator across their full player journey. Not the strategy, not the segments, not the platform. The assets. The journey logic and targeting stayed as they were. The only meaningful change was what the platform had to send.
Email open rate moved from 18% to 31%. Click-through went from 2.1% to 5.7%. Reactivation, which is the number that matters most because those players are already paid for, went from 0.8% to 2.7%.
The part I still think about is that they had been running on generic templates for six years before we touched anything. Six years of a sophisticated platform sending forgettable mail to a database that cost a fortune to build.
Nobody had done anything wrong, exactly. Every individual decision to reuse an old file made sense on the Thursday it was made.
AI has made this worse, not better
There is a comfortable assumption that generative tools have solved creative supply. What I have watched over the last three years says close to the opposite.
AI has not reduced the demand for creative. It has multiplied the volume operators think they can produce, which raises the expected output of teams that were already at capacity. It has also made it far easier to produce something that is technically an asset and commercially worthless. Generic in, generic out, faster.
The tools are useful. We use them daily. What they do not supply is the judgement about what a Brazilian reactivation email should look like versus a UK one, or which trust signal belongs in a first deposit reminder, or why the VIP tier needs a visual language that the mass segment never sees.
The fix is boring and it works
Stop treating CRM creative as a series of requests and start treating it as a production line with a schedule.
That means creative built against the CRM calendar in advance rather than commissioned three days before send. It means named segments getting their own visual identity, so a lapsed player and a new depositor are not receiving cosmetically identical mail. It means a refresh cadence with a date on it, because assets decay and the decay is invisible until the numbers move. And it means somebody owning that pipeline whose week is not going to be swallowed by the acquisition campaign, whether that person sits inside the business or outside it.
This is the production system we build with operators at Vegas Kings. We are not touching the platform or the strategy. We are fixing the supply line underneath them.
The platform was never the constraint. It has just been very good at hiding what is.
Moshe Adir is the founder of Vegas Kings, which has been designing and building for regulated iGaming operators since 1997. The Vegas Kings Creative Playbook, covering conversion, CRM, affiliate creative and market-specific design, is available at creativeplaybook.vegaskings.com.
NYCE perspective: diagnose the creative bottleneck
Before replacing a CRM platform or adding more segments, operators can compare performance by creative age, format, audience and market. If targeting is stable while response falls as assets are reused, the production pipeline—not the automation logic—is the more likely constraint.
The same principle applies earlier in the B2B journey: discoverability depends on how clearly a product is presented, not only on the sophistication of the system behind it.
Explore Vegas Kings in the NYCE Product Marketplace, or contact NYCE to discuss an introduction.
Originally published in the NYCE Marketplace section on Yogonet on August 18, 2026.