Industry predictions: UK racing's commercial value rises and personalisation comes of age

Alex Donohue, managing director and founder of Press Box PR

Below the line will be the new UK battleground

In a UK market where big, broad brush campaigns are increasingly becoming an expensive political hot potato, operators will continue to ramp up their focus on the new battleground: below the line. This includes the prime search engine result page real estate, where operators will put even more time and effort into ensuring they rank for the key commercial and editorial search terms, meaning they can cater for opted-in customers seeking the product, reaching people interested in having a bet in a non-intrusive and cost-effective manner. This approach will be a win-win in 2022, reducing the exposure to ambient gambling marketing for those not interested while increasing ROI for operators. In 2022, campaigners and some within government will claim the public are sick of gambling saturation, yet these claims will sit alongside search volume data that indicates there has never been more interest in the odds for the next manager to be sacked, the winner of Love Island or the next leader of a major political party.

Racing increases in commercial value – not just from the bookmaker battle either

After emerging from a year which saw racing hit the headlines for many of the wrong reasons and two of its Blue Riband races, the Cheltenham Gold Cup and Epsom Derby lose lucrative non-betting sponsorship arrangements, expect to see the Sport of Kings’ fortunes take an upturn in 2022. ITV Racing will continue to push to renew their free-to-air broadcast rights deal early to maximise advertising revenue from bookmakers who are keen to find a welcoming home in a post-DCMS review world, which sharpens the focus on racing as a sport not only reliant on betting but one that welcomes wagering and its marketing with open arms, at all times of day. These conversations should gather pace over the coming weeks not least due to the power of ITV Racing in terms of attracting and retaining new viewers to the sport who are right in the demographic sweet spot for bookmakers who know the new audience are likely to bet on other sports as well.

However, with major emerging consumer brands like Cazoo entering the fray – and being well received by a sport looking to simultaneously cash-in on its relationship with betting yet shed a perception of dependency – do not expect to see the shoot out to sponsor the major races as a simple carve up between betting brands alone. With ITV Racing able to tap into the power of their entire network when it comes to selling the coverage of their major meetings to a huge audience, expect to see even more promotion of racing next year. Along with an increase in famous public brands backing the sport, this platform effectively serves as a huge endorsement in betting done the right way being a fun, entertaining and safe leisure pastime which has a role to play in society – a message contrary to the one many will be pushing in 2022.

Betting sponsorship gives way to crypto, trading and NFTs – poaching some of the best people from the industry along the way

In 2022, expect to see an increase in betting brand sponsorship with sport – especially football – give way for a series of more exotic crypto, trading and NFT partnership deals with many similarities to gaming in terms of activation, product and marketing, as the sports industry tries to get a jump on marketing legislation heading down the tracks, as well as changing consumer demands. Equally, I’d anticipate various trading-style products to continue with a marketing push straight out of betting and gaming’s playbook, with increasingly competitive ‘free bet’-style acquisition campaigns mirroring what has been successful in our industry, hiring from the betting and gaming talent pool too. This will no doubt cause a headache for regulators in 2022, as well as clubs who need to prepare for a life without betting and gaming revenues while not incurring the attention of the same parties who deemed gambling an unacceptable bedfellow to begin with.

Sean Bowen, CEO of Push Technology

Personalisation comes to the fore

In 2022, I believe that hyper-personalisation will become a major focus for the online gambling industry. Why? Well to be honest, few gaming companies do hyper-personalisation well. There is undoubtedly a big opportunity out there. Consider that igaming companies can now look at what customers are interested in and tailor offerings, all in real time – enabling AI to make relevant recommendations. Responding to customers in a hyper-personalised manner can move the goal posts away from churn and towards customer retention and increased engagement.  And it’s not as challenging as it may sound. Using the right technology, gaming companies can easily track and analyse user actions and behaviour. Better yet, they do not have to build a lot of bespoke code to manage different topics or different groupings of personalisation data because there are low-code data platforms available to offload both the development burden upfront as well as the operational burden from back-end systems. These technologies can integrate, transform and manage the customer data from AI or machine learning systems and integrate it with all of the other customer data.”

The increasing desire for low code platforms in online gaming

The desire for application agility in gaming has been around for a while, but in 2022 this will really intensify. Gaming companies are constantly under pressure to build and launch new features quickly to stay ahead of the curve. That is where low code platforms step-in as gaming companies don’t want to code, they want to deploy out-of-the-box solutions quickly and efficiently. For sportsbooks, there are only so many peak events in the year, so they have limited time windows in which to build new offerings. Having a platform that can manage load with ease and without spiralling costs is a very compelling proposition. Crucially, these products must be stable during peak events which is a challenge. You don’t want to have to spin up cloud infrastructure that you can’t turn off quickly. The trick is to scale up quickly and not get a huge bill at the end of it. Low code platforms deliver on that promise and will be highly sought after in 2022.

Get used to the cloud

As we draw a line under 2021 and embrace 2022, we are seeing an unstoppable move to cloud-based solutions. It began in 2020, as companies had to cope with the operational effects on business caused by the pandemic.  In 2022, gaming organisations will take best practices learned in moving to the cloud and fully implement them for permanent use going forward. To do this, gaming companies will want assurance that cloud real-time data delivery is dependable and massively scalable, and that data security is a given. However, having said all that, in 2022 operational costs will still be the most pressing concern for gaming organisations given the challenges that many have faced this year. To reduce costs, there will be an increasing need for platform intelligence which can reduce operational complexity and cost, manage increased scale of real-time data delivery to meet market demands, and assure data access control and security. Therefore, next year we will see many more companies using intelligent platforms which unburden development teams and helps speed applications to market.