- Updated:
- Published:
How TAG Media uses Blask to win client calls and price smarter CPA deals
Elaine Gardiner, Managing Director at TAG Media, on turning market research from a bottleneck into a live competitive advantage.
When Elaine Gardiner needs to talk market dynamics mid-call with an operator, she doesn’t ask for a follow-up meeting. She glances at her second screen — where Blask’s Customer Profile, APS, and CEB metrics are already open — and answers on the spot. That one change reshaped how TAG Media researches markets, prices CPA deals, and shows up to every client conversation.
About TAG Media
TAG Media is an affiliate management company built for iGaming operators. The team handles the full spectrum of affiliate program operations — from recruiting and onboarding affiliates to optimising performance, tracking results, and driving revenue growth. Whether an operator needs complete outsourcing of their affiliate programme or targeted support on specific areas, TAG Media steps in as an extension of the client’s team.
The company’s ambition goes beyond service delivery: TAG Media is working to become the leading authority in iGaming affiliate marketing by setting the gold standard in quality, compliance, and sustainable growth.
The challenge: new markets meant days of guesswork
For a company whose value lies in knowing markets inside out, unfamiliar territory was expensive. Whenever TAG Media onboarded a new client or explored an unfamiliar GEO, the research phase turned into a grind: countless hours spread across multiple tools, stitching together fragmented data, and trying to build a coherent market picture from scattered sources.
“If we were unfamiliar with a particular market, it took a lot of time-consuming research and guesswork to learn about it. It was just countless hours and days of search across multiple tools, trying to pull all that information into one place”.
Elaine Gardiner, Managing Director TAG Media
The business impact was straightforward but painful: every hour spent on manual research was an hour not spent on revenue-generating work. The team was stuck in a cycle where the preparation required to serve clients well was actively slowing down their ability to serve clients at all.
And there was a subtler cost, too. When a prospective operator asked about an unfamiliar market during a call, the honest answer was often “let me get back to you”. That lag — between question and insight — made conversations less dynamic and decisions slower than they needed to be.
The solution: Blask as a live research layer
TAG Media chose Blask because it brought a scattered, multi-tool research process into a single interface — and delivered answers fast enough to use in real time.
“Blask had all the information we needed and more. We can find out almost anything we want to know within a few clicks”.
Elaine Gardiner, Managing Director TAG Media
The shift was twofold: better data and the speed to act on it the moment it mattered.
Blask on the second screen
Elaine now keeps Blask open on a separate monitor during calls with new and existing clients. When a conversation turns to a specific market or brand, she doesn’t need to pause, take a note, and follow up later. She pulls up the data live — brand performance, market dynamics, competitive landscape — while the conversation is still happening.
“I use it on another screen during calls with new clients, so I can easily see their brand performance or insights into the markets they are discussing, without having to go away and do research”.
Elaine Gardiner, Managing Director TAG Media
That shift from “I’ll get back to you” to “let me tell you right now” changes the dynamic of every client interaction.
Customer Profile for market intelligence
Among the Blask tools TAG Media uses regularly, Customer Profile stands out. It gives the team a layered view of different markets — who’s playing, how they behave, what the competitive landscape looks like — without the patchwork of sources they used to depend on.
APS and CEB for deal pricing
Elaine uses Blask’s APS (Acquisition Power Score) and CEB (Competitive Earning Baseline) metrics to calculate average player value across markets. That calculation feeds directly into how TAG Media structures CPA deals for its clients — turning platform data into concrete commercial decisions.
“I personally use the APS and CEB to calculate average player value, which gives me valuable insights in how to determine pricing on affiliate CPA deals”.
Elaine Gardiner, Managing Director TAG Media
Another major advantage: getting started with Blask required zero integration effort. No onboarding period, no technical setup — the team logged in and started working immediately.
The results: faster decisions, shared knowledge, smarter pricing
What Blask changed for TAG Media wasn’t one big number — it was the way the team works day to day.
Hours of research eliminated. Work that used to take days — mapping an unfamiliar market, benchmarking a brand’s position, understanding a GEO’s competitive dynamics — now takes a few clicks. The research bottleneck that once pulled the team away from client-facing work has largely disappeared.
Democratised access to insights. Before Blask, market knowledge often lived in one person’s head or in research that had to be requested and waited for. Now, every team member can access the same insights independently, at any time — no bottlenecks, no waiting.
“It allowed everyone access to the insights at any time without having to ask other people in the team or wait for one person to complete research”.
Elaine Gardiner, Managing Director TAG Media
More confident deal structures. With APS and CEB data feeding directly into CPA pricing decisions, TAG Media can approach commercial negotiations with data-backed confidence rather than estimates based on incomplete information.
More dynamic client conversations. Perhaps the most distinctive change: Blask turned client calls from one-way presentations into collaborative, data-informed discussions — with real-time market intelligence available at a glance.
What’s next: connecting the dots with Market Explanation
TAG Media is already exploring Blask’s newer features. Elaine is particularly enthusiastic about Market Explanation, which helps the team connect shifts in campaign performance to broader market movements.
“I’m loving the new Market Explanation feature — it allows me to connect the dots with the campaign performance we’re seeing with clients to explain peaks and dips”.
Elaine Gardiner, Managing Director TAG Media
For a team whose credibility rests on understanding markets better than anyone else, that kind of contextual intelligence becomes the difference between reporting what happened and explaining why.
Conclusion
Blask gave TAG Media something that’s hard to get elsewhere: the ability to walk into any client call already knowing the market — and to look up whatever comes up mid-conversation. Less time researching, more confident pricing, faster answers.
With Blask as a live research layer, the team spends less time assembling data and more time acting on it — in real time, on real calls, with real commercial impact.
