Americas Cardroom Bets on Teleportation to Sell Poker in Venezuela
Americas Cardroom's "Teleportation Room, Teleportation Cafe, Teleportation Lib" campaign is a three-part film series produced by DLB GROUP in Venezuela in October 2018 that positions the online poker platform as a means of instant imaginative escape, presenting the act of logging in as a form of teleportation into a richer, more compelling world.
The campaign operates across three distinct executions — Teleportation Room, Teleportation Cafe, and Teleportation Lib — each grounding the teleportation metaphor in a familiar, everyday Venezuelan setting. A living room, a café, and what appears to be a library each serve as the departure point from which a player is, conceptually, transported the moment they engage with the Americas Cardroom platform. The creative logic is consistent across all three assets: mundane physical space is contrasted with the vivid, high-stakes world of online poker, and the act of playing becomes the mechanism of escape rather than a passive leisure activity.
In Venezuela in 2018, this framing carried specific cultural weight. The country was navigating a period of severe economic disruption, and the appeal of a mental and experiential exit from daily pressures was a genuine consumer insight rather than a generic creative conceit. The campaign does not address that context directly, but the teleportation metaphor reads differently against that backdrop than it might in a more stable market. Americas Cardroom, an online poker platform serving Latin American and international players, used the campaign to extend brand presence in the Venezuelan market through DLB GROUP, a Caracas-based creative agency with regional expertise. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 54 out of 100, reflecting competent execution of a clear creative idea that stops short of exceptional craft or measurable cultural impact.
Americas Cardroom competes in a global online poker market that, by 2018, had become intensely consolidated around a small number of dominant operators. PokerStars, operated by The Stars Group, generated revenue of approximately $886.6 million from its international segment in 2018, according to pokerfuse.com, making it by far the largest single competitor in the space. GVC Holdings' partypoker platform recorded online poker revenue growth of around 40 percent in 2018, according to pokerfuse.com, representing a meaningful surge in activity that reflected broader market competition. Against that backdrop, Americas Cardroom's challenge in Venezuela was not simply to attract poker players but to position itself as the emotionally resonant choice in a crowded field where larger operators commanded greater name recognition and marketing resources.
The teleportation concept addresses that competitive pressure through brand differentiation rather than product differentiation. Rather than competing on tournament prize pools or platform features — categories where PokerStars and partypoker held structural advantages — the campaign attempts to own an emotional territory: the idea that online poker is not merely a game but a form of transportation. This is a classically defensive creative strategy for a challenger brand, one that sidesteps feature comparisons in favour of identity and feeling.
In Venezuela specifically, the gambling and entertainment media environment in 2018 was shaped by constrained consumer spending power and limited access to international entertainment platforms, conditions that made a locally produced, culturally attuned campaign more resonant than a globalised production might have been. DLB GROUP's decision to anchor each execution in a recognisable Venezuelan interior — rather than an aspirational international setting — reflects an understanding of that local consumer context and distinguishes the campaign's strategic positioning from the more globally generic advertising produced by larger competitors.
Roberto Gutierrez directed the Teleportation Room, Teleportation Cafe, and Teleportation Lib films, with Juan Velázquez serving as director of photography. The core visual grammar of the campaign depends on the contrast between the mundane and the transcendent: each film begins in a recognisable, low-stimulus environment and uses the moment of engagement with the Americas Cardroom platform as the pivot point into something more charged and dramatic. The success of that contrast depends heavily on production design and cinematography, as the juxtaposition must feel earned rather than arbitrary.
The creative leadership team at DLB GROUP brought a defined hierarchy to the campaign. Larry Hernández served as CEO, with Okarina Castaño as chief creative officer and Óscar González as creative director. Art direction was handled by Cristian Berbesi and Carl Pacheco, while Tomás Berroterán and Jhoselin Rivas are credited as copywriters. Paola Konopnicki served as executive producer. That depth of credited talent across direction, photography, creative leadership, and production suggests a campaign that was resourced and structured as a serious brand film effort rather than a low-investment local adaptation.
The three-asset format is itself a creative decision worth noting. By producing Teleportation Room, Teleportation Cafe, and Teleportation Lib as discrete but thematically unified films, DLB GROUP constructed a campaign architecture that could function both as a suite — reinforcing the teleportation metaphor through repetition across settings — and as individual executions deployable in different contexts. That structural thinking gives the campaign more flexibility than a single-film approach would allow, and it demonstrates a media-aware creative sensibility that treats the gambling entertainment category as capable of supporting genuine storytelling rather than simple promotional messaging.
No verified performance data for the Americas Cardroom Teleportation Room, Teleportation Cafe, Teleportation Lib campaign is publicly available. No published figures exist for sales lift, revenue growth, return on advertising spend, paid media impressions, or media and production budget. The campaign has not been documented as a winner or finalist at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards.
Structural analysis offers a qualified assessment in the absence of metrics. The teleportation concept is coherent and distinctive, and its grounding in everyday Venezuelan environments gives it a specificity that more generic gambling advertising lacks. The three-film format demonstrates strategic ambition and creative consistency. However, a Clapboard Score of 54 out of 100 reflects the campaign's limitations as much as its strengths. The core metaphor, while clear, does not push into unexpected territory; the connection between teleportation and online poker is intuitive rather than surprising, and intuitive ideas in advertising tend to generate recognition without generating strong brand preference.
For a challenger operator like Americas Cardroom competing against the scale and reach of operators such as PokerStars, creative work that scores in the mid-range on structural effectiveness is unlikely to generate the kind of lasting brand differentiation that reshapes market position. The campaign is a competent, locally intelligent piece of work produced by a credentialed Caracas team — but competence in a competitive entertainment media landscape rarely moves the needle without either exceptional creative ambition or significant paid amplification behind it.
The Americas Cardroom Teleportation campaign is a three-part film series produced by DLB GROUP in Venezuela in October 2018. Each execution — Teleportation Room, Teleportation Cafe, and Teleportation Lib — frames the act of playing online poker as a form of instant imaginative escape from a familiar everyday setting.
DLB GROUP, based in Caracas, Venezuela, created the campaign. Roberto Gutierrez directed the films, with Juan Velázquez as director of photography. Okarina Castaño served as chief creative officer and Óscar González as creative director, with Paola Konopnicki as executive producer.
Americas Cardroom used the teleportation metaphor to position online poker as emotional escape rather than a product feature. In Venezuela in 2018, that framing held specific local resonance. The strategy also allowed the brand to differentiate itself from larger competitors like PokerStars without competing directly on platform features or prize pool scale.
The Americas Cardroom Teleportation campaign received a Clapboard Score of 54 out of 100. This reflects a structurally coherent creative idea grounded in a clear metaphor, but one that does not reach exceptional levels of craft or creative surprise, limiting its potential for strong long-term brand differentiation in a competitive gambling market.
The Americas Cardroom Teleportation campaign has no documented wins or finalist placements at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. No verified award recognition for the campaign is publicly available from any of those bodies.
In 2018, dominant operators like PokerStars and partypoker — which recorded approximately 40 percent online poker revenue growth that year, according to pokerfuse.com — relied on scale and global reach. Americas Cardroom's locally produced Venezuelan campaign pursued emotional differentiation instead, a challenger strategy that prioritised brand feeling over product-feature comparison.
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