This article was published by EGR North America
Paddy McDermott, performance director at SportCaller, provides three top industry themes for next year
Free-to-play will go in-play – The trend towards live betting is hardly a new phenomenon, with in-play now accounting for up to 70% of Sportsbook in more mature European territories. However, to date, F2P games have not followed suit in any worthwhile or sophisticated way. That will change in 2020, particularly at SportCaller, as we corral the most accurate and lowest-latency data feeds to power our games and improve sports-fan engagement. This will play a vital role in helping to educate and stimulate new audiences, most notably the emerging one in the US, as to variables and possibilities of in-play betting. Embedding contextual stats, which intuitively speak to how the action is unfolding in real-time, will be a key factor in this development and we have some very exciting product launches planned.
US Election – The opportunity around the forthcoming US Election for Sportsbooks is massive, opening up betting to previously detached audiences. F2P will play a huge part in putting this offering in front of untapped audiences, allowing us to offer a data-rich product, illuminated by some slick visualisations. Say what you will about Trump – and plenty do – but his endless list of scandals, not to mention the partisan polarization of the impeachment process, will engage many more people in politics than ever before. And I don’t just mean Russian social media warriors!
Cross-Sell – This will be the year when the data definitively checks in on whether the DFS frontrunners in North America have been able to migrate their vast customer bases into the Sportsbook proposition. In short, the sports betting cross-sell will be king – whether that’s from the DFS, casino or poker verticals. Naturally, this will drive innovation and creativity in the sector, as operators look to harness some of the most successful features from their original products by repackaging them to educate and engage across sports betting markets. Again, the 2020 presidential election rates a perfect testing ground for this process.
Paddy McDermott is performance director at SportCaller, keeping its free-to-play games at the forefront of acquisition and retention techniques in an evolving regulatory space on both sides of the Atlantic.
