James McCarthy talks about Quantum’s journey from rebranding through to acquiring new businesses as it expanded into other verticals.
When James McCarthy joined Quantum (previously QiH Group) a year ago as the chief marketing officer, he bought more than just an operator’s playbook from his time at LiveScore and Betfair. He brought a front-row seat to where affiliate marketing was heading.
It’s becoming a bit of a cliché to say this industry is going through a seismic evolution, but it is true. For years, the traditional affiliate space has relied on straightforward traffic acquisition through tailored SEO and content marketing strategies.
But the game today requires a more agency-level approach with media buying capabilities across multiple channels, proprietary data stacks and even to some degree, working across different verticals.
Quantum’s rebrand from QiH Group at the end of last year is a clear representation of how traditional affiliate marketing companies in igaming are repositioning themselves. McCarthy makes clear to me they no longer see themselves as a standard affiliate, but a “tech-led media business”.
“At the centre of the rebrand was evolution, not reinvention. It wasn’t about rejecting our history – QiH has more than a decade of success. The new brand was to elevate what already existed,” explains McCarthy.
“The ‘q’ in QiH always stood for quantum, so it was bringing that out to the forefront. The company’s heritage has always been data-led… quantum being a unit of measurement. We wanted that to be at the centre of the business.”
Cashing in on e-commerce
For more than a decade, Quantum has built an “engine that turns paid media into high intent customers”. While that engine was built with igaming in mind, it’s now apparent it can be “pointed to other verticals”, he adds.
Quantum is diversifying its remit, expanding into verticals such as e-commerce. In June, the company acquired two digital rewards brands – Cashback and JoinCustard.
Cashback.co.uk, is an established cashback platform with hundreds of thousands of customers. Users can complete tasks such as surveys, enter competitions, and sign up for free trials or brand offers.
Similarly, JoinCustard, a digital rewards firm launched in 2024, focuses on online earnings for completing games, surveys, and shopping with brands.
The acquisitions are part of Quantum’s move beyond the affiliate marketing sector and into direct-to-consumer reward products. This extends its reach from a data-led performance-first approach into consumer platforms that can run alongside the platform using the existing infrastructure to help scale the products.
McCarthy believes the success Quantum has had in a cutthroat igaming scene, equips the firm to explore other sectors, and the “early signs are encouraging”.
“Gaming is one of the more challenging verticals when it comes to digital marketing,” he says. “It’s hyper-competitive, there’s more regulatory considerations… but that’s not to be complacent.
“We are under no illusion that it requires work to expand into another vertical. A lot of our success has been predicated on the investment in data and tech – both in terms of people and infrastructure.
“It’s about making data accessible at scale and being able to leverage that in your decision-making.”
The igaming affiliate vertical has a history of operators who are incredibly strong on the organic side and being over reliant on one particular channel.
James McCarthy, Quantum
Leveraging in-house capabilities
This is in part why the London-based company transitioned its technology operations from outsourced partners to a full in-house team as part of the rebrand and restructure. By “owning and understanding your own tech allows for greater control and flexibility”, which can then be “customised”, he highlights.
It’s also one of the ways McCarthy hopes the adtech can stand out among its competitors outside of igaming. It’s about “understanding our consumers, how they behave and interact and factoring that into our marketing strategy”, alongside “the tech, the data and infrastructure we’ve built to generate success in these new verticals”, he explains.
McCarthy is aware that his team are new to media buying, the different content formats or CRM strategies required for capturing consumer intent in wider verticals. But he’s confident they’ll “learn through experience”, after all, “there was a point in time where we would’ve known very little about igaming”.
“We’re not going to know everything about every vertical,” he admits, which is why Quantum now has its very own experimentation team within marketing.
“There’s an element of experimentation and investment that’s required to generate data, which enables you to learn faster. We believe in that a lot and it is something that will underpin what we do in understanding something as granular as ‘how does one funnel translate to another in various sectors’,” he says.
But it’s not just about experimenting across the marketing funnel. Quantum also has its own in-house creative team, who are leveraging AI to produce assets at a “fraction of the time” compared to previously.
“There’s more of a premium being placed on the creative in your marketing now,” McCarthy, who prior to joining Quantum, had always worked more on the digital marketing side, points out. “Not that long ago, a lot of value was being placed on budget and biddings, which is still important, but so is having the right signals within the marketing platforms.
“Advertising platforms are becoming more and more reliant on a variety of creatives – they need that diversity to fuel their marketing campaigns and AI has been great in enabling us to do that,” he boasts, but adds he’s sceptical about using the technology to automate and manage campaigns.
“While we use AI to draw insights quicker than we previously could, we definitely still like to have individuals monitoring the campaigns.”
Using AI is great, but having humans at the heart is even more important in this privacy-first era, says McCarthy, noting “people have the right to privacy”, so you have to “justify what you do track”.
Although Google halted its cookie deprecation rollout, more and more consumers are opting out of tracking. Therefore, the pool of data and signals traditionally used by advertisers through cookies is getting shallow.
“This presents challenges in attribution, in what you can feed back to the market and the platforms that inform your bidding,” he explains. “Some of this stuff may have been just considered good hygiene, but it’s becoming more and more important.
“The igaming affiliate vertical has a history of operators who are incredibly strong on the organic side and being over reliant on one particular channel. But what we’ve seen over the past 12-13 months is that it can present challenges in itself, so there is a real need for diversification.”
Diversification and growth
Quantum is not the first firm with roots in igaming that has repositioned themselves. Gambling Group.com recently rebranded to Grandstand, while GiG Media became Gentoo in 2024.
Meanwhile firms like Better Collective, Catena Media and Raketech have kept their respective company names, but repositioned themselves and media groups or tech-driven platforms to offer agency-level services across media for igaming, sports publishing, data and esports.
For Quantum, the rebrand, the team restructuring and the acquisitions are all part of its expansion journey as it navigates both chartered and unchartered waters. And that journey shows no signs of slowing.
“Growth is very much the objective,” beams McCarthy, and igaming still “maintains a high level of importance” for that. “But we’ve also seen how an asset purchase can shorten our time to revenue in new verticals.”
Quantum has got a taste of another slice of pie and it now wants more. The company is keen to diversify while also expanding its igaming arm into other markets. But the challenge for the firm now is balance.
“We’ve got a template now that shows us how the buy angle could work for us to grow fast and boost our revenues,” explains McCarthy. “But there’s always a trade off that needs to be understood when it comes to buying versus building… and maybe I’m showing a bit of bias here on the buyside as it’s something we’ve had success at recently and I do want to continue to explore.”
