The online gaming industry has become a hotbed of innovation since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of states being able to legalize sports betting last year. Artificial intelligence, automation, and data are now fueling a new range more personalized products.
WSC Sports is working toward a world in which automated video highlights can be served to fans immediately after a key play takes place. Those highlights could be used to incentivize fans to place a bets on the next play. (WSC recently showcased this capability with the NHL.) Media network VSiN and software as a service customer retention company Optimove are leveraging data and AI to better target users and cater to individual preferences.
“The last year has been a testimonial to the U.S. market,” said Shaka Arnon, head of business development as WSC Sports Technologies, an automated video technology company. “Sports betting has been around for years. But the Supreme Court put this entire market in flux in a good way, and it shows how much of a driver the American market is and how much innovation exists here.”
While gambling has been legal in Europe for years, the overturning of PASPA has accelerated changes in the space. Venture capital has put down major money bets on gambling startups. Seasoned European gaming operators have been pushing into North America. U.S.-based fantasy and media companies have converted themselves to sportsbooks. Technology has focused on increasing engagement, which encourage fans to interact by placing bets.
“When you have more power with artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can target better and really hit the different bettors and fans with their tendencies and interests to get them content they find interesting and maybe drive more engagement,” Arnon said. “Engagement has a direct correlation with revenue in the betting sphere. Engagement means clicks and bets. Engagement means revenue.”
Imagine a world in which a push notification of a video highlight from WSC were to alert a fan of a big moment in a game they care about. Now emotionally invested, that user logs into a gaming app to place a wager on the next play. As they sign into the app, they’re served a list of the most likely bets they would be interested in based off their betting history. Perhaps they’re served a personalized bonus for consecutive sign-ins, or are encouraged to look at new events or sports based on past engagement. Outside of the betting theme, this is exactly how many services in the wider world, from Amazon Prime to Netflix, operate.
“Our customer segments are very granular. We try to make as many customer profiles as we can because research shows that as granular as you can get, the more successful you are in your marketing campaign,” said Hila Perl, Optimove’s director of public relations.
Optimove has a long history in the European gaming market. Many of its clients are in the EGR Power 50, a list of the online gambling industry’s most powerful and influential operators published annually by Intel-owned industry news site EGR. Optimove’s software-as-a-service product helps brands manage communication with end users across any touchpoint, from push notifications to emails.
“In lottery and sports gaming, gaming operators need to keep users engaged, and this information needs to be valuable to the customer, so we use AI to basically put emotional intelligence behind the communication between brands and customers,” Perl said.
First-party demographic and behavioral data collected by gaming apps fuel the insights that Optimove feeds to its gaming clients, helping marketing teams “engage their players in a better way,” she said.
The next stage of these data-fueled insights will be leveraging them to build predictive models, which can help to inform business operations and the development of new products and services. Analysts at Optimove, for example, recently published a study on how win-loss ratios contribute to customer satisfaction. Winning all the time doesn’t necessarily correlate with increased engagement.
“Our data actually shows that you need to win some and you need to lose some for the customer to feel like this is a good experience. If they win all the time, it loses some of that draw,” Perl said. “People naturally look for some ups and downs because it’s not only about winning—it’s about excitement.”
Optimove is now also using predictive modeling to help some clients in Europe engage in “responsible gaming,” a movement to protect users from gambling addiction. The company has built a model for at-risk players based on historical data so that gaming operators can identify them earlier in the process.
“These are models of predictive analytics that go into a lot of detail and analysis. You have to be smart in how you build them because we don’t want to punish, we want to prevent,” Perl said. “It’s something that we see more and more as a request—more operators are interested in taking the socially responsible path and using their data wisely.”
Data has also been crucial to the recent expansion of VSiN, a media company that has been pegged as the CNBC of sports betting.
“We know exactly who is watching, from where and for how long—and that’s helped us get a pretty good sense of where the sports bettors are in this country,” said Brian Musburger, the founder and CEO of VSiN. “We’re looking ahead to a number of states where we know there’s a large audience that will fully embrace sports betting once it’s legal.”
VSiN has even approached several Las Vegas sportsbooks about sharing bettor data so that it can build predictive models based off historical behavior. By analyzing metrics such as average bet size, or the propensity to repeatedly bet for the same team, VSiN could identify patterns in betting that inform incentivization strategies.
“There’s so much information you can get from knowing the time a bet is made, who is making the bet, and building a profile for all these different kinds of bettors,” Musburger said. “There’s so much data that has not been properly mined. And I think for us, that’s a really exciting opportunity to go to these brick-and-mortar sportsbooks and partner with them to see what we can learn from the data they’ve been collecting and create products based on that.”
“There’s a lot to learn from consumer behavior,” he said. “It’s really a game of predicting future outcomes.”