Industry predictions: Customer engagement tools gain popularity and trampoline effect for fixed-odds horseracing in US
Bill Pascrell III, partner at Princeton Public Affairs Group, and 20SHOTS co-founder Jacob Kalms predict the big themes in online gaming this year
Jacob Kalms, co-founder and CEO, 20SHOTS
Customer engagement tools gain popularity
As operators behave more like publishers and publishers increasingly behave more like operators and affiliates, expect to see customer engagement tools like free-to-play games and dynamic, real-time interactive and informative widgets become increasingly popular in the digital sporting and media world in 2022. The race to offer a user the best, most up-to-date and compelling sporting content will only get hotter this year with users blurring the lines further between a range of providers – betting, media or affiliate – when it comes to engaging with sport through games, live scores, stats and livestreaming, as well as in a transactional capacity. In turn, businesses prominent in sport and publishing will begin to use the same engagement tools pioneered by the betting and gaming industry, harnessing gamified mobile technology to activate their sponsorships and partnerships in order to acquire, retain and engage customers and win the battle for eyeballs.Free-to-play marketing
In anticipation of betting being asked to vacate the front of football shirts, forward-thinking operators will look for workarounds which will include developing free-to-play offerings which are both compliant with marketing restrictions but also serve to build brands and cross-sell customers into other more traditional product areas. Free-to-play sports products will become an increasingly important part of the above-the-line marketing mix, including sports sponsorship as operators are forced into taking a more creative route to reach an audience in a society where advertising gambling products with direct call-to-action at scale faces greater challenges or in some cases is blocked entirely. This is already happening in Italy and I expect to see it become a more popular strategy in the UK in advance of marketing rules, particularly within football, becoming much stricter. However, this solution may well only be temporary as although the industry always moves first, regulation eventually catches up and it is by no means a certainty that free-to-play products owned by betting operators is exempt from any marketing restriction in the long term.US M&A and local expertise
Expect to see further M & A activity driven by US operating groups, but acquisitions won’t stop at operators, with tech firms, suppliers and other start-ups all on the menu as the major groups look to accelerate the import of the most successful technology, people and processes from more mature markets – although employing a simple copy and paste strategy with new acquisitions won’t work. The path to acquisition will not be as easy as many believe, as simply replicating what has been fruitful in the UK and the rest of the world will not work in America. While the principle of attracting and continuously engaging the right audiences will remain key as it does in any market, America will continue to stand out in 2022 as a market where local knowledge is of utmost importance.Bill Pascrell III, partner, Princeton Public Affairs Group
