Alea x Marketing Decoded: founder-led brand building and the art of focused storytelling

• Marketing Decoded debuts at ICE Barcelona 2026, featuring seven CMOs and marketing leaders from major B2B iGaming providers.
• Märit von Stedingk, Head of PR and Communications at Alea, discusses founder-led brand building, cultural marketing, and the art of focused storytelling.
• Series presented by Excellent Expo, produced by iGaming Real Talk and iGaming Republic, focusing on actionable marketing insights.

A new interview series spotlighting iGaming’s marketing leaders has launched from ICE Barcelona 2025. Marketing Decoded brings together seven Chief Marketing Officers and heads of marketing from leading B2B providers to share the strategies behind their brands’ success.

This episode features Märit von Stedingk, Head of PR and Communications at Alea, who reveals how the company has built a distinctive brand identity around radical simplicity, cultural values, and a founder whose personal presence opens doors that traditional marketing cannot.

Alea is a game aggregator providing over 17,000 games from more than 170 providers to operators and platforms worldwide. Founded in 2012 as a B2C online casino operator, the company restructured in 2020 to focus entirely on B2B game aggregation. That journey from operator to aggregator gives Alea a perspective on the iGaming ecosystem that few technology partners can match.

Simple messaging as a competitive advantage

In an industry saturated with complex product propositions, Alea has taken the opposite approach. Rather than competing on breadth of features, the company anchors everything to a single, clear identity.

“The nice thing about Alea is that at its core, it’s a very simple product, which is a very simple message. We are first and foremost the game aggregator. We do one thing very well,” Märit explained during the interview.

This clarity of positioning is deliberate. With 17,000 games and over 170 providers, Alea could easily try to be many things at once. Instead, the communications strategy treats aggregation as the central pillar, with every other service explained as something that flows naturally from it.

“As long as people understand the core central value and we focus on that, everything comes naturally from it,” she added.

For Märit, this simplicity is not a limitation. It is the foundation on which trust is built.

Built by operators, for operators

Alea’s messaging carries particular credibility because it is rooted in lived experience. The company was not founded as a tech vendor looking in from the outside. It was built by people who had already been operators themselves.

“We come from a position of having been operators ourselves. Way back in the day, this was built because Alea was an operator and we needed a game aggregation system that we could trust,” Märit noted.

That origin story shapes how Alea communicates with its clients today. Rather than leading with a product catalogue, account managers act as strategic advisors, helping operators understand which games work in which markets and connecting providers with the right distribution opportunities.

“We have a world view of what iGaming is doing in terms of the games. So let me show you, through our account managers, which games work well in which market,” she explained.

This dual-sided approach, serving both operators and game providers, positions Alea as more than infrastructure. It positions them as a trusted guide through a complex landscape.

Founder-led marketing as a trust gateway

One of Alea’s most distinctive marketing tools is the visibility of its founder, Alexandre Tomic, who maintains an active presence across podcasts and LinkedIn. Märit is clear-eyed about what this activity is, and is not, designed to achieve.

“With that specific part, I think that’s a lot more branding, a lot more PR than lead generation,” she clarified.

In a relationship-driven industry where business is built on personal trust, founder visibility serves as a first point of contact, a signal that the people behind the company are credible, accessible, and genuinely invested in their partners.

“Alex is that first gateway of trust, that first gateway of messaging where he is like, yeah, we are good people. That is at the core,” Märit explained.

The philosophy extends beyond Alex. Co-founder Charlotte Lecomte is equally embedded in the company’s culture, with every final candidate for a role at Alea going through a founder interview with both of them, a conversation focused not on business skills alone but on cultural fit.

“Every single person that comes through Alea ends with a founder interview. And they don’t necessarily talk about business,” Märit revealed.

Culture as a marketing asset

For Alea, what happens on the stand at events like ICE Barcelona is an extension of the company’s internal culture, not a performance put on for the occasion. This year, the stand featured an oxygen bar and a hyperbaric chamber, activations that raised eyebrows but were entirely intentional.

“We have a hyperbaric chamber and an oxygen bar here, not because it’s a gimmick, but because we genuinely feel like, come and look after yourself at Alea,” Märit said.

The philosophy echoes Alex’s own words on his Under Pressure podcast: legends aren’t built in comfort, and diamonds are made under pressure. The stand experience is not a marketing stunt. It is a physical expression of the company’s values.

The underlying message is consistent with how Alea treats its employees and partners alike. In an industry where standing out at a show with 600 exhibitors is a genuine challenge, Alea’s answer is not louder graphics or bigger giveaways. It is people.

“We have the people. That’s our biggest selling point. The people here are kind. They want to get to know you. They’re not trying to oversell you,” Märit explained.

“We care for our partners like we care for our employees.”

The storyteller’s measure of success

Märit describes herself first and foremost as a storyteller, and she has a specific and somewhat unconventional metric for knowing when the communications strategy is working.

“I have found that as the year has progressed, more and more journalists and magazines are coming to me and giving me articles where I don’t actually have to give notes,” she shared.

For her, that moment, when the brand narrative has been so clearly established that journalists arrive already aligned with it, is the real payoff of sustained communications work. The goal is to reach what she calls “act three”: the point where the brand speaks for itself.

“The third act of any good story should be what the brand is. Then you find different ways to tell act one and act two so that people eventually find you and get to that act three. That for me is really exciting,” she said.

The goddess of luck: Alea’s Inspirational Muse

The Alea Goddess is far more than a visual identity device; she is their inspirational, interdimensional being of beauty and power. While her name is rooted in the Latin word for luck, her story carries a complexity that goes much deeper than her appearance suggests.

“What most people don’t notice at first is that she’s actually wearing a mask. She’s an interdimensional being. When you take off the mask, there’s something a little bit dark about her,” Märit revealed.

The goddess was born out of Alea’s transition from B2C to B2B in 2020, making her a symbol of reinvention as much as luck and a fitting emblem for a company that has navigated both sides of the industry.

Quality over volume: the future of B2B content

Looking ahead, Märit sees the B2B iGaming content landscape heading in a direction that mirrors the challenges already familiar in B2C, an overwhelming volume of content with diminishing returns on attention.

“We are getting to a point where there is no way that we can all watch every podcast. We can all read every article,” she observed.

Alea’s response is not to produce more, but to produce better. Alex’s Under Pressure podcast, where he sits down with founders, risk-takers, and visionaries to explore the defining moments that shaped them, is a deliberate example of this approach: depth over frequency, meaning over volume.

“You need to have key moments where people are going to take the time. Visibility just for the sake of visibility isn’t enough. You need to have some kind of substance,” Märit said.

Marketing Decoded is presented by Excellent Expo and produced by iGaming Real Talk in collaboration with iGaming Republic.

The complete series features six additional episodes with marketing leaders from: Elen Atanesyan (18Peaches), Yaroslava Romaniv (GR8 Tech), Valentina Bagniya (SOFTSWISS), Tereza Melicharkova (Elantil), Irina Veselkova (Endorphina), and James Bennett (EveryMatrix).

Watch the first two episodes now:

• Endorphina x Marketing Decoded
• 18 Peaches x Marketing Decoded