The intersection of sports media, sports teams, and gambling continues to flourish and shows no signs of slowing down as betting resumes in the next two to three weeks with the NBA, MLB, and NHL.
That will be a focus this week at the SBC Digital Summit hosted by BC Events, the organizer of Betting on Sports America. The conference runs Tuesday through Thursday.
Charles Gillespie, CEO, CEO of Gambling.com; John Levy, CEO of theScore, Brian Musburger, CEO of the Vegas Stats Information & Network (VSiN) and Daniel Kustelski, founder of Chalkline Sports will talk about how sports media outlets are positioning themselves to take advantage of the nationwide expansion of sports betting that could see as many as 40 states legalize it by 2024.
Erika Nardini, CEO of Barstool Sports, will talk about the sale of a portion of her business to Penn National Gaming and what the deal means to the company and the intersection of sports media and gambling. Jay Snowden, president and CEO of Penn National Gaming, will be speaking at the conference.
The Denver Broncos on Thursday signed a deal with BetMGM that includes a betting lounge at the football stadium. That comes on the heels of other deals the Broncos did last month.
“When I see FanDuel sponsor the (Denver) Broncos and Betfred sponsor the Broncos and PointsBets sponsor the (Detroit) Tigers and see William Hill and CBS doing a media deal and Penn National buying Barstool, there’s a lot of money being spent on acquiring customers,” Kustelski said. “It’s going to be difficult for sportsbooks to acquire these customers and that’s why they’re looking at exclusive relationships and signing sponsorship deals. And the dance card is starting to fill up. It’s all about leveraging these relationships into first-time depositors and extracting the value from those.”
With COVID-19 and not a lot of sports for people to bet on, Kustelski said it will be interesting to see what deals pan out. The sportsbooks that can “cut through the clutter” in their region will be the winners.
“If you’re Betfred (for example), you have got to leverage that Broncos’ relationship, and you have to find Broncos’ fans that come to your sportsbook and sign up. Could you have spent that on something else that may be digital advertising and achieved a similar result in return on investment? We will see a lot of these sports sponsorships over the coming three or four months.”
On the media side earlier this year, Penn National bought a 36 percent stake in Barstool for $163 million in cash and stock with the ability to increase its stake to 50 percent in three years.
“We’re excited for sports betting and excited for sports to come back,” Nardini said. “I believe that we’re going to cover sports betting and sports in a way that is very unique, more fun, more reliable, and more compelling and more original than anybody else. To have that come to light with a betting partner like Penn, let’s say like inside the Greektown Casino in Detroit, we’re excited to see that energy and coverage and the way we do things become physical inside of sportsbooks and also become virtual on an app.”
Nardini said there’s been a handful of deals in the industry to this point but expects “every major media company and every major sports team and every major influencer who talks about sports” having an affiliation with a betting partner.
“Legal sports betting is nascent and the rollout is clunky by being done state-by-state,” Nardini said. “The differentiator for every single sports betting company is going to be a license, a product, and marketing, what states they’re in, what they’re app looks like and performs like and how they get people to want to bet with them over someone else. That sets the table for a lot of interesting (mergers and acquisitions).”
Betting companies are doing the deals because their largest expenditure is marketing, Nardini said.
“What do you need for a successful sports betting business? You need a license, a place for them to bet and people,” Nardini said. “The media partnership gives the sports betting companies eyeballs, tonnage, and contextual integration into sports. It’s expensive when you look at the arms race it’s going to create. Everyone is either buying rate card ad deals or you find a way to create a partnership where you give someone upside and enable you to get more media at less cost.”
Individual delegate passes are available for $49. Company passes are also available for group discount rates of $350 (for 10 passes), $500 (for 25 passes) and $1,000 (for 100 passes).
To register, go to https://sbcevents.com/sbc-digital-summit-north-america/tickets/
