The plans that have Optimove’s CEO excited for 2025

Watch the full video interview, conducted live at ICE 2025, here.

Last year and this year are shaping up to be very busy for Optimove. Tell us what have been some of your standout highlights from the past year? 

Yakuel: “There’s lots and lots of highlights. We continue to grow as a business, we are about 500 people strong today, and hoping to cross a very exciting milestone as a SaaS business really shortly. And lots of announcements, a lot of products, OptiLive, OptiPromo, looking at more acquisitions – so a lot of exciting things are happening in our world.” 

You’ve recently launched OptiLive, a new sports marketing tool. Can you tell us a bit more about that? 

Yakuel: “So as a CRM marketer your dream is always to find moments in the player’s life cycle which are conversation starters. So sporting events you have lots and lots of those potential conversation starters right, for example your favourite player just scores a goal. Or Steph Curry just hits a three-pointer in the middle of an NBA game.  

“What if you can message the player in real time about that thing that just happened in the game, and you can also find the players who are actually interested in that specific match. Because obviously there’s tons of games happening all the time. 

“So we’re using OptiX recommendation technology to find the segment, we’re using data feeds from L Sports to get the real-time data from the matches and we put those two together to make magic happen.” 

There’s been another recent announcement hasn’t there, Optimove Ignite+. What is that product and how does it fit in with Optimove’s goals? 

Yakuel: “So as a business that’s basically matured and become very much enterprise-ready, we felt that for the smaller gaming startups, gaming boutiques, emerging up-and-comers we haven’t been giving them the right attention. 

“So Ignite+ is a programme designed to ultimately target those types of businesses, give them better payment terms, more support, more of our knowledge and expertise, help them to grow, a lot of benchmarking, and even from a product perspective tailor something that’s better for them. So it’s us committing to the boutiques, to the emerging ones, to the startups of gaming.” 

So that’s designed to help build your profile among smaller organisations, in addition to market leaders. What makes Optimove so popular with leaders in the igaming industry globally? 

Yakuel: “I think it’s a combination of heritage – we contributed a lot to inventing this field – but then also being fortunate enough to continue to grow as a business, getting the right funding, and keeping our key talent; I’m very proud in our executive team, we’ve got around five people who have more than seven years with the business, and myself as the Founder still being at it as energetic as I was before.” 

Looking at the year ahead, what role do you think that gamification and promotions will play in igaming strategies for 2025? 

Yakuel: “We have great partners in gamification, and we plan on continuing to invest there and make moves. We see that basically the marriage of gamification and CRM marketing is extremely smart and works very very well in gaming because brands always look for new ways to engage with customers – especially when in some regulated markets it’s much harder to engage with players with based on bonusing. So gamification becomes more and more important and we plan to be there.” 

What are you personally most excited about for 2025? 

Yakuel: “Most excited…so number one is continuing with my fitness regime, that’s something I’m very much excited about. But on top of that we have really big moves that we’re doing. The first one is we are designing a platform in a new way so basically carving it out to two separate major offerings. We’re going to call it Engage and Orchestrate, still to come.  

“And the next is we’re going to basically launch a completely new brand and basically launch a movement around Optimove that’s related to AI, and it’s all about positionist marketing, so we’ll be making those announcements soon but positionist marketing is something I’m very much excited about.” 

Finally, your marketing event Optimove Connect is returning this year. Tell us more about Connect 2025 and what’s happening there. 

Yakuel: “We did Connect 2024 in London after a long period of not doing it. It was really well done by our team and a lot of customers and prospects attended. This year we hope to enjoy the new Connect brand that started to pick up from last year. 

“And yeah, same thing – we invest a lot in our community, we see Optimove users and Optimove prospects as a community and Connect is the place where we celebrate with content, good times in London. ICE may no longer be in London but Connect is.”