A tripod needs three legs to be viable.
Sports betting also needs three successful aspects – wagering, media, and business – to become a sturdy presence in the U.S. gambling landscape. And as the legal sports-betting industry gains momentum four years after the repeal of Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, there is optimism that major breakthroughs are looming.
“We’re really starting to see that the convergence is real from a content perspective,” said Sportradar Regional Head of Sales U.S. Brian Josephs Thursday during the SBC Summit North America. “And we’re really starting to see the convergence is real from the product experience.”
Josephs spoke at “Converging Worlds – Defragging the Betting, Media, and Sports Business Model,” a discussion hosted by SBC Americas Editor Jessica Welman.
As sports-betting operators vie for market share in an increasingly competitive space, it’s become increasingly important to promote differentiation. Caesars Entertainment Head of Sports Ken Fuchs said his company addresses customers in a variety of ways in order make people understand what its brand values and promotes. He mentioned the talent Caesars Entertainment has hired, including former ESPN broadcasters Trey Wingo and Kenny Mayne, comedian J. B. Smoove, the Manning football family, and brand ambassador Rachel DeMita, as crucial to the company’s success.
“It’s about how you use that talent in a way that communicates our story and what we stand for in the sports-betting marketplace, and having some fun,” Fuchs said.
“We need to educate, because a lot of new people have never bet on sports before,” Fuchs added. “It’s an intimidating thing when you come into all of our apps and try to figure out what all these numbers mean.”
Not only gaming operators are trying to determine how to best leverage sports betting. NASCAR Managing Director of Sports Betting Joseph Solosky said the racing company embraces sports betting to increase ticket sales and its broadcast audience and drive growth.
“NASCAR’s a unique sport, in that people typically aren’t going off platform to look for NASCAR stats,” Solosky said. “When NASCAR fans are looking for information on a race, they go to NASCAR.com.
“So we embedded a lot of sports-betting content on our platform. We do that uniquely and organically within our own content division, via videos, podcasts, written articles.”
On fuboTV, which streams over 150 channels, sports betting is being incorporated into its technology platform. Scott Butera, president of Fubo Gaming, said the technology allows people to place wagers on its live sports programming.
“We think there’s a correlation between people who watch sports and bet on sports,” Butera said. “We know that if you watch sports for a certain number of hours, you’re likely to bet on sports if you’re within a certain demographic. We use that data to create unique offerings to individuals as they’re watching streaming, so that you as a watcher of sports can have a unique experience that’s interactive, as opposed to simply just watching an event on TV.”
As mentioned in many panels and discussions over the two-day SBC Summit, consolidation is likely inevitable among sports-betting operators. Welman compared the landscape to college football, saying “We’re all going to be in the Big Ten.”
“When the money comes in, consolidation begins,” said Spotlight Sports Group SVP B2B U.S. & Fantasy Sports Rick Wolf. “That’s the way it’s worked in every industry. As technologies get built and people see a lot of money, frothy money here in the U.S. surrounding sports betting, then that’s the time it consolidates.”
“Rick is right,” Fuchs said. “We’re very much in the early stages of this industry. Every app essentially looks the same. I think there’s going to be a lot of differentiation. We’re all running at 150 MPH to get into the next state and to build an end-to-end system that’s really good for the customer.
“And as you do that, we’re all going to find places where we want to differentiate, and that’s through innovation.”
