Month: August 2022

The supplier drew interest from investors including US venture capital fund Animal Capital.

20Shots did not disclose the amount invested by Animal Capital, but the supplier did state that the funds would be used to support the rollout of its largest range of products to date.

Fantasy5’s Premier League product will be supplemented with games covering the Uefa Champions League, Europa League and other European top-flight leagues.

Prizes for the additional leagues will remain at £10,000, as offered to players of the Premier League game. 

Last season, 20Shots also secured the support of BoyleSports, with the bookmaker signing on as the first licensed operator partner of Fantasy5.

“As demand grows in the ultra-competitive free-to-play space, we’re investing our ability to quickly and seamlessly roll out products and games on a white label basis for a number of different partners across multiple divisions and competitions – with the ultimate objective of using the technology seamlessly across the most popular sports worldwide,” 20Shots co-founder and chief executive Jacob Kalms said.

“Our growth model forecasts we will break the half a million player mark this season, with our scaling driving down the cost of acquisition for partners while maintaining our engagement, dwell and retention rates considerably above industry averages.”

Animal Capital managing partner Marshall Sandman added: “In a crowded market of fantasy, free-to-play, and pay-to-play sports betting, 20Shots distinguishes itself with a best-in-class team and direction that has allowed the product to stand out distinctly and early. 

“Their flagship game Fantasy5 is an early hit, their B2B relationships are uniquely positioned to make this an exciting asset and their ability to resonate and be sticky with a younger audience are all reasons why we were excited to be on the journey.”

July’s total was 19.4% lower than the $256.3m spent by consumers in June, but 6.2% higher than the $194.5m bet during July of last year.

Of this total, $76.1m was spent on baseball betting, with $16.1m on basketball and $2.9m on football. A further $53.5m worth of parlay bets were place in the month, while $56.8m was bet on other sports.

In terms of taxable adjusted gross revenue from sports betting, this amounted to $20.9m, which was 32.3% higher than $15.8m in June this year and also 19.4% up from $17.5m in July 2021

Blue Chip Casino and partner FanDuel retained top spot with $7.4m in revenue off $61.7m in bets ahead of the Ameristar Casino and partner DraftKings with $5.0m in revenue and a $61.3m handle.

Belterra Casino and its FanDuel-operated sportsbook placed third with $3.1m in revenue off a handle of $26.3m.

The state was also able to collect $2.0m in sports betting tax during the month.

Under the deal, which includes the option to extend for an additional two years, Pollard Banknote will provide at least 70% of the Lottery’s scratch games per contract year

The estimated value of the deal, including all optional extensions, is approximately $28m (£23m/€27m).

Pollard Banknote has been working with the Minnesota Lottery since 2007.

“We are thrilled that the Minnesota Lottery has once again chosen us to be their primary partner for scratch games and related services,” Pollard Banknote senior director and sales and marketing director Byron Peterson said.

“Having served as the Lottery’s primary scratch games partner for over a decade, we have worked to provide players across Minnesota with best-in-class scratch games and retail initiatives that foster engagement and growth.”

Minnesota Lottery executive director Adam Prock added: “Throughout our time working together, the company’s expertise has helped us to maximize revenue in support of programs that benefit all Minnesotans.

“We are pleased that this agreement will allow us to continue to collaborate and bring engaging scratch games to our players.”

The extension comes after Pollard Banknote last week it revealed that it experienced a series of challenges across its core instant tickets business during the second quarter of its 2022 financial year, and expects price rises to continue to impact operations in Q3 and Q4.

Instant tickets remains Pollard Banknote’s largest business, but increases in the prices of key inputs such as paper, ink and freight, coupled with ongoing significant demand from lottery customers, have led to increased spending.

Pollard Banknote said the nature of instant ticket contracts includes longer terms, averaging at four years, with primarily fixed prices for the entirety of the term, which in turn makes it difficult to pass on large input cost increases immediately.

Co-chief executive John Pollard said one strategy to offset costs will be to increase selling prices during contract extensions and requests for proposals (RFPs) as they come up for bid, but as these contracts do not start immediately, it could be some time before an impact is seen.

Furthermore, Pollard Banknote noted that instant ticket production volume in Q2 fell short of budget by approximately 8-10%. This was put down to continuing challenges recruiting and retaining entry level staff, increased staffing challenges with a higher number of call-outs and absences, and a higher number of unexpected mechanical and production issues.

Pazner elaborated on the company’s long-term potential for growth in international markets in the wake of the acquisition of William Hill. This acquisition gives 888 control of three brands: 888, Mr Green and William Hill, in a number of markets.

The brand strategy will involve targeted investment in the brands that have the best growth potential depending on the market.

“We’re planning to take the best brands for each market, invest in them and then obviously reduce investments in brands that need to be rationalised and that have a lower potential in each market,” Pazner said.

“This gives us an opportunity to put our resources behind the most successful brands with the highest potential for growth in each market rather than investing in all brands and all markets.”

He added that efforts to reduce focus on less successful brands would begin in the fourth quarter of the year.

“The brand choices are being made now and will be rationalised already in Q4 this year. So just to give a simple example, 888sport in the UK is a challenger brand coming from a very low market share base.

“And if you take that and work that out between all of the different markets, we feel we have a better way to grow sports betting in all of those markets, focusing the marketing investment and the product investments in a road map into a single brand in each of the markets, while keeping the other brands, I would call them secondary or tactical or removing them all together from the market.”

888 had initially agreed in September 2021 to acquire the non-US business of William Hill. This came soon after US operator Caesars acquired the entire William Hill business for approximately £2.90bn, with the intent to dispose of all but its US assets.

Originally, the purchase price for the deal was £2.2bn. However, 888 and Caesars agreed to reduce the purchase price to acquire the assets by £250m, with the cash portion of the deal now set at £584.9m instead of £834.9m.

Pazner was speaking following the announcement of 888’s first-half financial results, in which revenue dropped by 13.1%, partly due to preemptive efforts to increase safer gambling controls in the UK ahead of the results of the Gambling Act review.

While this is 888’s largest market, the business has hopes for international expansion with launches in the US and Africa.

Since March, 888 has launched in Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya and Mozambique, with the business organised in the market under the 888bet brand with a focus on a sports betting vertical.

Another centrepiece of the company’s future growth strategy will be the relaunch in the Netherlands following its exit from the market in October last year. The company stated that it now expects the launch to occur in Q4 rather than Q3.

Clarion Gaming managing director Stuart Hunter was among the delegation, which traveled to meet land-based gaming giants such as Light & Wonder, Konami, IGT, Aristocrat, AGC and Everi.

As part of the visit, the group also received insights on the latest consumer-trends in casino gaming and received guided tours of Resorts World Las Vegas and Palms Casino.

Hunter said it was important that Clarion reaches out to and listens to its customers.

“The Clarion team is heavily invested in the industry and as custodians of the world’s most cosmopolitan B2B gaming event I believe it’s vital that we spend time listening to our customers and stakeholders based throughout the world,” he said.

Hunter added that a number of the issues discussed would also be explored at the ICE Symposium in Las Vegas on 10 October, the first day of G2E. This symposium, led by Clarion Gaming director of industry insight Ewa Bakun, will allow participants to choose their own topics of discussion.

The visit came with these land-based businesses set to return to ICE for the first time since 2020.

“In addition we were able to discuss the return of the land-based sector in February 2023 as well as underline our commitments to help maximise ROI and to ensure that ICE London continues to play a lead role in helping to deliver their business objectives,” Hunter said. “The insight and feedback that we received during our time in Vegas is already being fed into the 2023 at-show experience.”

ICE London 2023 will take place on 7-9 February 2023 at the ExCeL London.

Under the deal, GiG will supply its platform to Kings Media for an initial period of three years, with an opportunity for renewal.

Ontario’s online gaming market launched on April 4 this year. Since then a number of operators, including DraftKings, Flutter’s PokerStars and Playtech have launched in the province.

Read the full story on iGB North America.

Since the dawn of the online gaming industry, operators have used bonuses and VIP programs to acquire and retain players. But gone are the days when you can just chuck bonuses at your VIP players to keep them happy. 

Regulatory reforms in jurisdictions like Sweden, Denmark and the UK mean that the era of carefree bonusing is at an end. Now, regulators seek to impose limits on what are perceived as irresponsible promotional strategies.

As such, operators now need to be much more creative about how they retain players. With restrictions on bonuses, operators need to be more careful about when and how they present any promotions to their customers. And to do that, they need to be packing the right tech. 

While regulations may be getting tougher, the good news is that tech solutions are getting smarter and more agile, allowing operators to explore new ways of keeping their players happy. 

No more loyalty

Recent studies suggest that consumers across all sectors are becoming less brand loyal.

So in a crowded online gaming market, a 5% increase in player retention can translate to a 25% increase in profits, according to a study by Slotegrator.

Offering personalised, localised and tailored promotions is vital to improving the relationship you have with your VIPs, especially for any operator that wants to increase loyalty and reduce acquisition costs.

The solution to this can be technology. Implementing tech that allows for automated reward processes into your current system not only helps to amplify personalised and localised marketing, but it also humanises the customer experience, which in turn helps to enhance engagement and ultimately the relationships a brand has with its customers. 

Rain or shine

At the same time, the right technology can also help fuel creativity and help ensure that online and retail operations fully complement each other.

For example, if you’re an operator looking to fully captivate that full omnichannel experience, you could set a promotion based on location and the weather to reward your online VIP players in a way which compliments both your online and land-based entity and features a bit of the ‘wow’ factor.

You could quickly identify all VIP players who are actively playing on your online site within a 5km radius of your retail operation. 

If the weather is nice, you could action an alert to send them a cocktail bonus encouraging them to come to your retail venue and enjoy a cocktail and your onsite entertainment. If the weather is bad, you can send them a special bonus to encourage them to come and play inside your retail venue. 

If you’re an online operation that works in multiple jurisdictions, you might want to trigger special promotions based on your players’ public holidays that differ from country to country.

The right technology will allow you to manage that without having to manually input all the different dates from different calendars. A lot of hours will be saved, and your VIP specialists will thank you as well.

You could also offer special birthday promotions for your VIP customers, or tailored free bets based on a bettor’s favoured sports team. The possibilities are unlimited. All it takes is a bit of creativity and the right automation tools. 

The bottom line is that ‘humanising’ your operation is now the key to building brand loyalty in a tough regulatory landscape and to standing out in an increasingly regulated market. In order to do that you simply need your imagination, creativity and the right automation technology. 

The comments came during Flutter’s earnings call for the first half of 2022, following results in which the business revealed that its FanDuel brand had turned a profit during Q2.

Jackson (pictured) argued that in both the UK and Australia, Flutter’s businesses had “outgrown regulations”.

He discussed the introduction of point-of-consumption taxes in these markets as an example of a regulatory challenge that had a short-term negative impact, but made Flutter brands stronger in the long term.

“Our scale and operating leverage have allowed us to mitigate the impacts, both through operational efficiencies, and also through market share gains as smaller operators were required to exit from the market.”

In the presentation, Flutter also noted that “scale operators are best placed to capitalise on regulatory change through superior operating leverage and ability to take market share”.

Jackson then outlined the “proactive steps” that Flutter brands have taken, in preparation for the “post-white paper market”.

These include more efforts to focus on recreational customers. Flutter groups its customers into three tiers, and said that 43% of its UK and Ireland customers are in the most recreational tier, while only 5% are in the highest tier.

A further step was the launch of safer gambling measures including deposit limits for under-25s, with these checks costing the business £48m in H1.

Jackson said these changes would “position [Flutter] well” for the review.

As the same time, though, Jackson spoke of cost-cutting measures the business had implemented in the UK. Though he did not mention redundancies, the business revealed that it would lay off staff in the UK and Ireland earlier this month.

Besides hailing the success of the US business and remaining optimistic about the UK, Jackson discussed recent acquisitions by Flutter and the opportunities these presented for new markets.

Jackson said that Sisal, acquired this month, fit the goal of what Flutter wanted to achieve through acquisitions, through diversification of product into the lottery space and geographical footprint with its large presence in Italy.

Jackson also made note of India-facing rummy operator Junglee, which again performed well during the period.

Breaking from the pack

Commenting on the business’ H1 results, meanwhile, jackson noted the success of FanDuel. 

“Our US performance in the quarter was outstanding and continues to exceed all expectations,” he said.

Jackson said that the fact the business had made a profit was all the more notable because, while other businesses had reduced marketing spend during the quarter in order to get closer to profitability, FanDuel had continued to dedicated resources to player acquisition.

“This was despite the fact that we were breaking from the market and leaning into customer acquisition in Q2, acquiring over half a million new customers in the quarter on the back of the good customer economics we’re seeing.”

Looking ahead, Jackson said he expects FanDuel to also be profitable on a full-year basis for the first time for the 2023 calendar year if online betting does not launch in California during the year.

The conglomerate has been linked with a move into the sports wagering market for some time now, with Chapek in November last year saying its sports broadcasting arm ESPN is the “perfect” channel to achieve this.

Speaking in an earnings call after the group announced its second-quarter results, Chapek said talks with potential partners have been ongoing and that sports betting remains a realistic option for Disney.

“We have been in conversations for quite a long time now with a number of different platforms to add some utility to sports betting and take away some friction for that for our guests,” Chapek said.

“We have found that basically our sports fans that are under 30 absolutely require this type of utility in the overall portfolio of what ESPN offers, so we think it’s important.

“We’re working hard on it, and we hope to have something to announce in the future in terms of a partnership there that will allow us to access that revenue stream and also make sure that our guests having their needs met.”

Disney already has a presence in the sports betting market through ESPN, which in September 2020 entered a deal with DraftKings and William Hill, the latter of which has since been acquired by Caesars

Under this agreement, ESPN has been promoting DraftKings’ daily fantasy sport updates, while with the William Hill agreement, which transferred to Caesars through the acquisition, ESPN has been to showing the bookmaker’s betting odds.

It hardly seems possible, but Malta is celebrating twenty years of regulated igaming. It is safe to say that the industry has been transformed in the time and we take a pause to review the milestones and learn lessons for the future.

The July edition of IMGL Magazine also has regulatory updates from the European Commission, Ontario and Macau as well as an in-depth look at the choices facing voters in what has the potential to be the world’s biggest new sports betting market: California.

Online Choice Architecture may not be the most common phrase ever to trip off the gaming lawyer’s tongue but it marks the next potential frontier in regulation. Web mechanics to steer or confuse consumers into making sub-optimal choices are in regulators’ sites and they are studied in detail in the IMGL Magazine.

As ever, something for all interests and jurisdictions so do enjoy it.

IMGL Magazine July 2022