DraftKings on harnessing the power of Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa is by no means a new concept, but in the spirit of Steve Jobs and re-inventing the wheel, the online gambling industry has turned another corner in its efforts to increase communication with its consumers.

Most recently US-based fantasy sports firm DraftKings turned to Alexa to offer up-to date ports news and player projections to its customer base. EGR Technology spoke with the operator’s director of strategic partnerships, Adam Barrick for an insight into the Alexa Skill and how it can boost customer engagement.

EGR Technology: How did the partnership with Amazon come about?

Adam Barrick (AB): I do more product and tech related business development and for us it is obviously an exciting opportunity to work with an entity like Amazon who prides themselves on being forward thinking and innovating on a tech partnership and product perspective. We at DraftKings have a very similar sort of approach to partnerships and being forward-thinking. And being very innovative in how we engage with sports fan. We’ve worked with Amazon before, we have an app in their app store and have had a number of conversations on how we could work with them and this one made a tonne of sense given the scope and scale of Alexa/ Echo products. It’s a partnership we’re really excited about.

EGR Technology: What do you like most about the Skill and partnership?

AB: It’s another touch point to engage with our fans. We have our core product which is our daily fantasy sports web product and app, but for us, we’re always looking at different ways we can engage with our users, whether it’s content that isn’t necessarily tangentially connected to daily fantasy sports, but is more lifestyle based, or whether it’s creating a different sort of content aside from our classic mode.

So we’ve launched an arcade mode which is higher scoring and a little more active for our users. We’ve launched a ‘Pick’em’ mode to our games, which creates like an easier drafting experience for our users. We just announced a World Series game mode, and it’s the first time our users are able to play a DraftKings contest during the World Series. I think it speaks to the spirit of us being so forward thinking and trying to create different ways to engage with our users.

What we like about the Amazon partnership is this is very much a content play because it enables DraftKings users who also have an Alexa to create another touch point to engage with their Amazon Echo via an Alexa Skill, but also engage with DraftKings in that realm too. As their making decisions around drafting their line up, they don’t need to do a tonne of research online, they can use a product they would ordinarily use for everyday activities and we are becoming a part of that every day activity as a result of it.

EGR Technology: Is there scope to connect the Skill and the DraftKings product more directly?

AB: I think as we look at how we’re going to expand the skill that’s something I think we would certainly take a look at. Although we’re only five years old as a company, and we’ve achieved a lot in five years, I think for us, as we introduce people to DraftKings, we still want to make sure that user experience is really part of our core product, so for us to create an iteration of drafting a line-up outside of our core product, I think is further down the road on our product dev roadmaps. If you look at a product like Amazon Alexa, and you look at other similar voice controlled entities, it is certainly logical and makes sense but you’ve got to make sure we’re not necessarily deviating and confusing users.

EGR Technology: What can users of the Skill do currently?

AB: Basically they are able to get scores or projected points for DraftKings users. If you ask for Tom Brady Alexa will say Tom Brady is projected to score, for example, 15.6 DraftKings points this week. If you ask during a live game or after a live game it will tell you how many points he’s actually scored.

Also, if you’re looking for a projected point total it will give also you his salary. We’re constantly updating it with the projected points, the points they’ve scored and their salaries. It is as up to date as possible. There’s a lot of interesting things we can do with it down the road. We launched the Skill at the end of September so we’re still gathering data and user information on how to introduce other sports to it and how to expand it into other markets. Right now the Skill is available in the US and in the UK and we as a company obviously operate in Germany, Austria, Ireland, Malta and Canada. I think we’re going to look at potentially introducing this into other markets in organic ways that are localised. We don’t want to introduce a US model in Germany, [for example], because that will create a disconnect with the US.

Amazon Echo and Tap

EGR Technology: How is the content updated and how live is it?

AB: By virtue of working with Amazon on creating a Skill it was a very collaborative process. Amazon has standards that they uphold with any Skill they introduce into their eco-system, much like we have very high standards for any sort of UX that a user will have with anything DraftKings, whether it’s our core product, or something like this. It was a very collaborative process and the way we update it is that we have a dev portal on our side that we are able to update the Skill through on a weekly basis.

There was a pretty heavy lift on our side in creating the skill. I worked closely with our product team, with our dev engineers, with our new media team. We worked with a number of Skills engineers including a business development contact at Amazon in bringing this Skill to life. It was a very collaborative and months long process in order to get this up and running, the updating process now currently is not as invasive as the development process was, but it’s something we monitor through a dev portal.

EGR Technology: What sort of research did you carry out in the R&D phase?

AB: For us, we already had an existing relationship with Amazon because our app is in the app store, but any time we’re partnering with someone we want to make sure they’re best in class in what they do. The types of research we did is knowing that Amazon from a global perspective has reach, but Amazon Alexa has also got global reach. We wanted to make sure the Skill we were developing was going to be appealing to not only DraftKings users but also Alexa users across the world. We worked closely with them on things they’ve seen from an engagement standpoint to make sure we’re best positioned from an overall Alexa standpoint.

We offer ten different sports on our platform from NFL down to esports, but NFL is our biggest driver from an engagement standpoint, so the reason we launched this partnership around the beginning of the NFL was precisely because we knew it would be a high engagement period for us. We launched our Skill a day before Amazon had their first NFL stream in late September so we made sure we coincided the launch with that so it duck tailed nicely into a larger NFL initiative that Amazon was already conducting. We’ve continued to get very strong engagement over the past few weeks since the launch.

EGR Technology: This early in the game, there is no way of gauging user engagement and conversion rates, how will you look at converting consumers onto the main DraftKings product in future?

AB: We consider this skill more of a content play than a direct response play, so while we hope [in the] bigger picture people are more apt to engage with DraftKings because of the multitude of touch points we create out there through various product ecosystems, I think for us it’s more about creating another touchpoint in a relevant, scalable space like Amazon Alexa. We’re only a few weeks in so we’re still trying to evaluate how it can get people into the upper funnel and then down to the lower funnel which is obviously getting them to play DraftKings. These things help with consideration and user intent and it creates just another fun angle for people to experience and understand what we are. This helps us articulate what our product is by virtue of the point, or by virtue of the salary [of a player]. Connecting that tangentially to the players really helps define what DraftKings is.