Everything Digital Podcast: Marketing Eight Summits Across Five Continents, with Lauranne Urban

Host: Matteo Fabiano, Marketing Manager, ICS-digital · Guest: Lauranne Urban, CMO, SiGMA World · Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

On the latest episode of the Everything Digital Podcast, Matteo Fabiano, Marketing Manager at ICS-digital, sits down with Lauranne Urban, Chief Marketing Officer at SiGMA World. Listen to the episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Lauranne's career started in operational marketing, including time in the automotive industry. She joined SiGMA seven years ago as an intern community manager, learning English on the job, and today leads a creative and marketing organisation of more than 100 people across SiGMA's summits, media and four core brands.

They talk about how the SiGMA marketing machine has grown, why localisation is more than translation, how organic and paid media should work together, where affiliate marketing is heading, how SiGMA uses AI, and what it takes to build a high-performing team. Below is an edited version of the interview.

In this conversation

• A global audience is not one audience: SiGMA pairs its brand with local teams and reads behavioural signals, not just demographics.
• People don't stop being consumers at work, so B2B and B2G marketing has to reach them across every channel they use.
• Affiliates are moving from traffic generation to audience ownership and need to think like media and technology businesses.
• Events give affiliates, many of whom work independently, trust, community and a better return on their time.
• At SiGMA, AI amplifies people rather than replacing them: the creative and marketing team has grown to more than 100 people.
• Getting something 90% right and learning from the market creates more value than months spent chasing perfection.

Meet Lauranne

Matteo: SiGMA is a prominent name in iGaming and events. Can you tell us about your role and SiGMA's goals for 2026?

Lauranne: As a CMO in the iGaming industry, I think there's a broader responsibility many of us share: moving the industry beyond some of the historical stigma attached to it, and contributing to a more responsible, transparent and regulated gaming ecosystem. That's closely connected to SiGMA's mission, so my role goes well beyond promoting a brand. It's also about supporting SiGMA's wider mission of advancing gaming, and positioning the organisation as a platform where the industry can develop, professionalise and engage with a much broader group of stakeholders.

On a more operational level, I oversee how we position SiGMA globally, how we build and protect brand equity, how we generate demand and, ultimately, how marketing contributes to the commercial growth of the group. I often describe SiGMA today as a 360-degree integrated iGaming marketing ecosystem, because we're no longer simply the events company we were 12 years ago. Across the wider group we now have four core brands: SiGMA for iGaming, AIBC for tech and AI, Affiliate Grand Slam for affiliates and FX World for forex and brokers. The ecosystem extends across our summits, news and media, government engagement, SiGMA Play, poker and much more.

So my responsibility has two dimensions. Internally, it's making sure each of those verticals gets the positioning, visibility and marketing infrastructure it needs to grow. Externally, it's strengthening SiGMA's position as a trusted industry authority and making sure our partners keep seeing value in working with us across that ecosystem.

At this stage of the year, I wouldn't frame it purely around 2026, because we're already looking much further ahead, to the SiGMA 2030 vision: a trusted global platform where B2B, B2C and, increasingly, B2G converge. You'll see that B2G approach in Rome, at our biggest flagship event, where we expect to welcome 65 regulators and representatives of regulatory authorities from different continents. Bringing that level of public-sector participation into the same room as operators and suppliers is part of making the platform useful beyond commercial networking.

We're also running three days of regional regulatory workshops, where regulators, operators, advisors and other stakeholders can compare approaches and discuss practical oversight challenges. The programme covers North American licensing and compliance, cross-border risk, compliant operating structures in Brazil, illegal gambling, state lotteries and regulatory cooperation in Africa. In three words, the 2030 vision is commercial, diplomatic and political: using summits as diplomatic accelerators, strengthening government collaboration, creating tailored support for emerging ecosystems, developing long-term partnerships, promoting transparency and responsibility, and contributing thought leadership on the future of gaming.

There's no typical day

Matteo: You're coordinating a lot. What does a typical day look like for you, and what do you enjoy most about it?

Lauranne: There really isn't a typical day, and that's probably what I enjoy most. In such a fast-paced industry we have to adapt quickly: regulation evolves, markets evolve, technology evolves, and sometimes the conversation changes almost overnight. So my day moves very quickly between strategy and execution.

I started my career in operational marketing roles, so I understand most of the functions I now oversee, and I think keeping some hands-on involvement is important for senior management, because it keeps you connected to the operational reality of your teams. In the morning I might be reviewing the positioning or go-to-market strategy for one of our sub-brands, an hour later discussing acquisition performance and data, then reviewing major creative campaigns, dealing with an event-related challenge, discussing budget allocation or working cross-functionally on a new commercial opportunity.

As a CMO, you have to be comfortable operating at several altitudes at once. You need to protect the long-term direction and equity of the brand, while keeping enough visibility of execution to reorganise quickly when something isn't working. Strategy without operational visibility can become disconnected from reality, and execution without strategy simply creates activity rather than impact. Finding the balance between the two is the part of the role I enjoy most.

Inside the SiGMA marketing machine

Matteo: The SiGMA marketing machine, let's call it, must have evolved a lot over the years. What kind of scale are we talking about?

Lauranne: I love calling it that, because it reflects an enormous evolution. When I joined SiGMA, the creative department was maybe a few dozen people. Today we're talking about more than 100 people across integrated creative and marketing operations, spanning marketing, design, content, video and news. Alongside our major summits, we deliver more than 150 additional activations a year: networking events, retreats, poker tournaments and our golf tour, and many of them need marketing collateral too. So operationally, you're orchestrating multiple markets, languages, audience segments, brand campaigns and commercial priorities. For me, the real achievement isn't the volume, it's the orchestration at that scale.

We've deliberately kept a significant part of that capability in-house. That gives us speed, institutional knowledge and brand consistency, which can be harder to keep when you work with freelancers or outside agencies, and it means we can react very quickly to developments in the market.

People sometimes describe SiGMA's approach as aggressive marketing. I see it completely differently: I'd call it high-velocity integrated marketing. Our competitive advantage is our ability to produce, adapt, distribute and amplify content at speed while maintaining quality and brand consistency. Because that capability has been built internally over many years, it isn't easy to replicate.

A global audience is not one audience

Matteo: Your marketing spans everything from golf to poker, so you have to know your audiences well. How should events and media companies track what matters most to multicultural, global audiences?

Lauranne: I think the first thing companies need to understand is that a global audience is not one audience. SiGMA understood that very early. Whenever we develop a new market, event or product, we make a conscious effort to surround ourselves with local expertise. We bring the organisation closer to the audience rather than expecting the audience to adapt to us. Whether it's our show in Manila, São Paulo or Cyprus, where we built offices, the principle is the same: we bring the institutional knowledge and identity we've developed over the years and combine it with local culture, expertise and market intelligence.

When we developed the brand in South America, for example, we acquired an events company in São Paulo and built our offices there, so our team knows the market and can combine that knowledge with SiGMA's expertise. That's what makes us stronger, because localisation isn't only about translation. You can't create one campaign, translate it into six languages and call it localisation. Different markets have different levels of industry maturity, regulatory frameworks and digital behaviours.

That's why I believe modern audience strategy has to combine global brand consistency with local behavioural intelligence. You need to move beyond basic demographics and analyse behavioural signals: what topics audiences consume, which formats generate engagement, which speakers create interest, what people search for, what converts, which channels introduce them to the brand, and how those behaviours vary by geography.

Genuine localisation also requires significant investment, and not every company can justify the same infrastructure in every market. You can't open an office or host an event everywhere, so strategic market prioritisation becomes critical: you need to identify where localisation will create enough incremental value to justify the investment. Events and media companies have an advantage here, because we generate both digital and physical signals. Someone might discover an article, watch a reel, register for an event, attend a session, meet a partner and then engage with more content afterwards, and you can connect those touchpoints into a more complete picture of the customer journey. We've seen the result at SiGMA, where the audience has changed significantly over the years, with increasing participation from C-level executives and governments.

People don't stop being consumers at work

Matteo: Do your key audiences search for and respond to organic content and paid media differently?

Lauranne: Every marketer probably has a different answer to that. I believe one of the biggest mistakes in B2B, and increasingly B2G, marketing is assuming that because somebody is a CEO, a founder or an operator, they can only be reached through traditional professional channels such as email or LinkedIn. People don't stop being a consumer because they are at work. A CEO might discover an industry story on LinkedIn in the morning, see a video on Instagram at lunchtime, receive something through WhatsApp in the afternoon and see the brand again through paid ads, Twitter or Telegram that evening. That's why I strongly believe in multi-touchpoint marketing.

Organic and paid media have different functions, but they shouldn't operate in silos. Organic content creates credibility, authority, discoverability and community, while paid media provides scale, targeting precision, frequency and the ability to accelerate messages that are already showing traction. The strongest strategies give importance to both, because they reinforce each other. Organic performance tells you what audiences naturally respond to, and paid media lets you amplify those signals, test them across segments and extend their reach. So for me, the strategic question isn't paid versus organic. It's how intelligently you orchestrate both across the customer journey.

Affiliates are becoming media businesses

Matteo: SiGMA has deep roots in affiliate marketing. What are the next challenges and opportunities for affiliates in 2026 and 2027?

Lauranne: There are many challenges, because affiliate marketing is becoming much more sophisticated. The days when the model could rely mainly on traffic arbitrage and relatively simple acquisition funnels are disappearing. Affiliates increasingly need to think like fully developed media and technology businesses: brand equity, first-party audiences, content quality, technology, regulatory compliance, attribution and channel diversification.

Search is changing, social platforms are changing, AI is changing discovery behaviour, and regulation keeps evolving differently across jurisdictions. That creates more pressure, but also significant opportunity. Affiliates who build genuine communities and trusted brands, rather than depending on a single acquisition channel, will be much more resilient. We're moving from a pure traffic-generation model to an audience-ownership model, and that's a significant strategic shift.

Why events still matter for affiliates

Matteo: Affiliate marketing can be a lonely pursuit. What role can events play in knowledge sharing and community building between affiliates?

Lauranne: This is precisely where physical events, and especially SiGMA summits, remain extremely powerful. Digital platforms are fantastic for distributing information, but trust develops differently face to face. For affiliates, events create opportunities not only to find commercial partners, but also to compare strategies, understand what's working in other markets, discover new technology, discuss regulatory challenges with peers and learn directly from people solving similar problems.

Our next event in Rome is a good example: we'll have a dedicated area focused entirely on affiliation under our Affiliate Grand Slam brand, bringing together leading figures from that ecosystem under the same roof, so they can have the more personal conversations they might not have online. As we like to say, Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was our affiliate community. We spent years developing and understanding that network and bringing high-level expertise into the organisation. Now the objective is to turn that into tangible value for the people attending: not only financial ROI, but also the return on the time they invest.

To give you an example, around 2,500 delegates attended our first SiGMA North America in Mexico City last September, and the networking programme started before the expo itself, with a co-hosted event, a golf tournament, padel and go-karting. That's what I mean by return on time: creating repeated opportunities for people to meet before and around the expo, exchange ideas and build real relationships, rather than relying on a single interaction on the expo floor. That festival spirit is our signature. It means being highly selective about speakers and curating exhibitors, so the people in the room can add value to one another.

There's also an important psychological dimension. Many affiliates are entrepreneurs working independently or managing distributed teams, and events give them a physical community. So I don't believe events should simply function as a marketplace. The best events become knowledge and relationship infrastructure for the industry. People should leave not only with leads, but with new ideas and relationships, and that's what we're trying to create at SiGMA.

Speed, and how SiGMA uses AI

Matteo: Is there anything about working at SiGMA that might surprise listeners, and what role does AI play at SiGMA in 2026?

Lauranne: Both questions lead to the same answer. What might surprise people most at SiGMA is the speed. Because of the scale of our calendar and ecosystem, we're effectively running several marketing cycles at once: there's always another market, event, campaign, project or opportunity moving through the organisation. We learn, adapt and change every day, and that requires an extremely adaptable culture.

AI fits naturally into that environment. At SiGMA, we don't see AI simply as a way to produce more content faster. The more interesting question is where AI can remove low-value activity and give our people more time for high-value thinking. That can mean supporting research, identifying patterns or accelerating localisation. But brands also need to be careful. If everyone uses the same technology to produce the same type of content, marketing becomes incredibly generic and boring. We've already seen some of those campaigns, so we try to stay vigilant. AI can create efficiency, but it can't replicate human judgement, taste, cultural creativity or genuine relationships. At least not yet.

For now, I see AI as an amplifier of human capability rather than a substitute for it, and SiGMA is a good case study. For us, greater efficiency hasn't meant cutting headcount. I know many people in our team worry about the introduction of AI, but greater speed has let us create more value, develop more brands and expand what marketing can deliver, which in turn has created demand for more specialised talent. Our creative and marketing organisation has grown to more than 100 people thanks to AI. The culture we're building isn't one where people fear AI. We want our teams to understand it, experiment with it and grow alongside it. The objective isn't to compete against AI, it's to become much more capable because of it. With the speed this technology is developing, my answer may be completely different tomorrow, but at SiGMA we're embracing AI as much as we can, and it's now part of our daily work.

Matteo: It can be hard for marketing to keep up with constant business growth, so AI can act as a bridge that amplifies those efforts.

Lauranne: I remember when I started at SiGMA as an intern seven years ago. I didn't speak English at all at the time, so I literally learned English at SiGMA: I had the marketing skills and they had the language to teach me, so it was a kind of barter. I was an intern community manager, and writing a caption for social media took me so long that I didn't have time to focus on anything else. When ChatGPT appeared, it made my captions grammatically better, more attractive and more varied, and our marketing started to grow, with richer content and better impressions. We developed new accounts and new platforms, and that's how our team started to grow. It's a perfect example of how AI grew a whole marketing team.

Looking beyond iGaming for inspiration

Matteo: Marketing takes different shapes in different industries. Is there an industry you take most inspiration from?

Lauranne: Not just one, fortunately. I don't think marketers should only study their own industry, quite the opposite. I like benchmarking us against companies far larger than us, because it forces us to think bigger and keeps ambition high within the team. I take inspiration from industries that are exceptional at capturing attention, building communities or designing customer experiences.

Airlines, for example, are fascinating from a revenue optimisation and upselling perspective. Look at Ryanair: the advertised ticket might start at 30 euros, but the commercial model is designed around ancillary revenue, and the upselling strategy behind it is incredible from a marketing perspective. Luxury is exceptional at protecting brand consistency and perceived value. Entertainment understands storytelling and the attention economy. Hospitality understands experience and emotional memory. And brands like Coca-Cola have developed systems that are incredibly difficult to replicate. The best lessons often come from completely different industries. I'd rather look at companies that don't offer the same product as us than check what our competitors are doing, or we'd just duplicate what already exists in our market.

I make the same analogy with SiGMA's live event content engine. Over the years we've developed our own internal methodology for capturing, producing and distributing content while an event is happening. It's part process, part technology, but it also depends heavily on people and accumulated institutional knowledge. It's our secret recipe, the way Nutella or Coca-Cola have theirs. Consumer brands are often far ahead of B2B businesses on frequency, cultural relevance and multichannel behaviour. So my philosophy is simple: don't only ask what the best company in your category is doing. Ask what the best companies in the world are doing to earn people's attention, then work out which of those principles can be translated into your own environment.

Matteo: And is there anything iGaming does particularly well that other industries could learn from?

Lauranne: Again, I think it's speed and adaptability. I used to work in the automotive industry, which was also B2B, and it was completely different. When you're building a project for a new car, you're talking about 12-year agreements, and decisions take much longer because of all the testing and regulation. What's particular about iGaming is the speed, because it's an incredibly entrepreneurial and international environment. Companies test quickly, enter markets quickly and adapt quickly. You can't spend six months debating every campaign, because six months later the opportunity itself may have changed. That doesn't mean abandoning strategy. It means reducing the distance between strategy, execution and learning.

What Lauranne wishes she'd known

Matteo: Is there anything you wish you'd known when you were starting out?

Lauranne: Probably that perfection can sometimes be the enemy of progress. Particularly in a fast-moving industry like ours, you need to get comfortable with testing, learning and iterating fast. Of course you protect the brand and maintain standards, but you also need speed. I've learned that getting something 90% right into the market, measuring the response and improving it based on real behaviour often creates far more value than spending months trying to make something theoretically 100% perfect. The market can teach you more than another month in the meeting room. If you're going to move fast, it's better to do something quickly and not perfectly polished than not to do it at all.

What's next for SiGMA

Matteo: With Rome on the horizon, what's next for you and for SiGMA?

Lauranne: For SiGMA, the next stage is making the global ecosystem we've built increasingly connected. We now operate across B2C, B2B and B2G audiences, in very different markets with different regulations. The challenge is to connect those audiences while staying consistent with the mission that has driven SiGMA's evolution: moving from stigma to SiGMA, and continuing to advocate for advancing gaming.

For me personally, that challenge is very exciting. As the company grows, my objective isn't simply to make the marketing organisation bigger. It's to make it smarter, more scalable, more measurable and more strategically valuable to the business. That also means embracing structural changes in our market, from AI to data, and turning disruption into competitive advantage. The objective isn't to resist change, but to build an organisation capable of converting change into growth.

Building a high-performing team

Matteo: You've built a marketing team of more than 100 people. How do you build a high-performing team, and which other departments contribute to a winning strategy?

Lauranne: High-performing teams come down to three pillars: clarity, ownership and trust. People need to understand the objective and why it matters, and have enough ownership to make decisions. I don't believe high performance comes from controlling every detail, and at our scale that's impossible anyway. It comes from hiring strong people, creating clear processes and building a culture where individuals feel accountable for outcomes, rather than simply responsible for completing a task.

Someone once told me, “If you're the smartest person at the table, you're sitting at the wrong table.” That has stayed with me. As you grow as a leader, you realise your role isn't to be the greatest expert in every discipline but to surround yourself with good ones. Your value as a leader isn't knowing everything, it's knowing how to bring the right expertise together.

On your second question, a winning strategy needs cross-functional alignment, because marketing can't open a new market alone. You need sales, because they understand commercial demand and client expectations better than anyone. You need events, because the physical experience has to deliver on the promise marketing creates. You need operations, because execution has to work locally, finance, because growth has to be commercially sustainable, and leadership alignment, because entering a new market is ultimately corporate strategy, not simply a marketing campaign.

Before opening a new opportunity, I look at four layers: market intelligence, audience intelligence, commercial alignment and execution capabilities. When those four align, marketing becomes considerably more powerful, because you're not trying to manufacture demand on your own. You're amplifying an opportunity the organisation is collectively prepared to capture. A winning strategy isn't created by the marketing department alone.

Matteo: Thank you so much for taking the time today, Lauranne. See you in Rome.

Lauranne: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to share the passion behind the scenes, because we have a passionate team working tirelessly to make our events incredible. I'd like to thank them in this podcast, because they are the people who make those events extraordinary.

Listen to the full episode

Hear the full conversation between Matteo and Lauranne on the Everything Digital Podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.