Bodog Founder Returns to Spotlight

Published September 10, 2009 by OCR Editor

Calvin Ayre will be this year's keynote speaker at the Budapest Affiliate Conference.

Conference delegates eager to pick up some hot marketing strategies for the online gaming industry will benefit from Ayre's depth of entrepreneurial experience. He proved to be exceedingly successful in expanding a business and a brand. With as little as $10,000 in his pocket, Ayre built Bodog into a multi-million dollar global empire and easily one of the most recognisable brands in the industry. By late 2006, bodog.com was being hailed as the largest online gaming site for traffic.

However, after selling the online gaming business to the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group, Ayre appeared to have vanished. It turned out that this couldn't be further from the truth as we now know that during this time he had been developing a renewed vision of the Bodog brand - the global rights to which he had apparently ingeniously retained. He had instead chosen to simply licence the use of the Bodog brand to various operators.

Ayre now spends his time searching for potential Bodog brand licensees. Under this new 'franchise' model the Bodog gaming experience is available to players around the globe from individual operators who bring their own regional knowledge and expertise to their respective markets.

There is some speculation regarding the reasons behind Ayre's emergence from seclusion. A new Bodog brand licensee has recently been secured for a Bodog-branded poker network and there are rumours circulating that Ayre will reveal who will head this latest venture at the conference.