Q&A: FairPlay Sports Media CEO on making his mark on the business

Candid can be somewhat of a clichéd term when describing an interview, an easy reach to set the scene of a conversation. However, FairPlay Sports Media CEO Stuart Simms and cliché aren’t two words to put together. 

The CEO, who is back after receiving treatment for his cancer diagnosis this year, is relaxed, open and frank when speaking to EGR.

After a career across multiple sectors, including as CEO of XLMedia before joining FairPlay in September 2023, Simms set about shifting the company that most outsiders will know as the parent company behind oddschecker. 

Indeed, the company, known as Oddschecker Global Media upon Simms’ arrival, has been shifted. M&A to bring in Italy-facing affiliate SuperScommesse from Catena Media and AI-specialist Quarter4 have been crucial in helping shape FairPlay in Simms’ vision.

This year has seen product and tech ramped up while Simms’ health also had to take priority. That time out has allowed the CEO a sense of reflection. 

“It gives you a different perspective on things,” he says. “Something like this causes you to take a bit of a step back and think ‘Where am I focusing my time and effort? What’s important?’ It’s been good; quite cathartic in some ways.”

What is clear, as Simms explains to EGR, is that his passion for the business has not faltered. Plans in the offing to tackle the US, add new revenue streams and lead on the tech front are all key to the future. 

Here, Simms lays out how he sees the company shaping up in the years to come.

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EGR: It’s now been two years since you arrived as CEO of FairPlay Sports Media. How would you sum up the past 24 months?

Stuart Simms (SS): Busy, fun, challenging and exciting. Over my career, I have been lucky enough to lead billion-dollar organisations, as well as being a CEO of various small-medium, VC-backed start-ups, always with a focus on cutting-edge and innovative technology. 

I feel like I’ve arrived at FairPlay at a really good time in my career, where I have bags of experience, plenty of knowledge of technology businesses as well as the knowhow to unlock them commercially. 

When I arrived, Oddschecker Global Media was a product and tech business – it just didn’t know it and that was quite interesting for me. It was an enticing opportunity and part of the reason why I took the job. 

It wasn’t the obvious fit for what I was looking for, but with the aspirations that Bruin Capital had for the business, alongside the technical, platform and data capabilities that existed in oddschecker, it was a very compelling proposition that had never been taken to the market.

So, the first two years have been about rebranding to tell a broader story and using platforms and data to deliver new products and innovation at pace. FairPlay is a fundamentally different business from when I started and that’s very stimulating to be part of. 

EGR: When we spoke previously, you said you were shocked at the underlying capabilities within FairPlay when you first arrived. Do you think that’s fully been tapped into now?

SS: About 80% of our revenue still comes from advertising as a broad bucket. Then there’s a percentage of that, which is affiliate. We’re still substantially a performance marketing/advertising business that operates in multiple territories. We do a really nice job on that and we’re going to do a better job on that with additional data and investments in technology.

However, there’s 20% of our revenues that I get really excited about – a high growth opportunity for us – which is our licensing business, where we license our technology and our services. 

We have media partnerships with the likes of Forbes and we’re building that base out even further. Confido Network fits in that bucket as well – that’s the fastest growing affiliate network in the world and that whole approach is incredibly disruptive.

Then we have a new business we launched – our subscription business. We’ve launched in the UK and now in the US as oddschecker+. We’ll go into other territories based on existing data and platforms.

EGR: Could that 80-20 split shift significantly in the coming years to reduce the performance marketing percentage?

SS: What’s interesting is because we have so much credibility in the advertising affiliate space, that allows us to then explore these technology relationships either with big media publishers or with the sportsbooks themselves. 

I don’t know if you’ll ever get to 50-50. However, the two elements of the business work really nicely and synergistically. Because one, we’re working with operators to grow in multiple territories and grow our audience and increase engagement. And then the BetTech side – that includes the licensing revenues and Confido – accelerates both that acquisition and growth into new territories. 

At the same time, this helps us test and learn with our technology on other people’s websites to drive engagement, dwell time and monetisation opportunities. So, the two work symbiotically and it’s encouraging to see how that’s that panning out.

EGR: Looking at some of the product developments this year, and mainly the bet builder comparison tool, has that been a gamechanger for the business?

SS: It has multiple different sorts of business models attached to it, so you can make money from it in different ways. It’s a good example of how we’re unlocking some of the data and the potential we had as a business. 

If you think about the complexity of delivering a bet builder product, you’ve got to have deep, knowledgeable integrations into the operators to be able to get access to the APIs to allow you to then explore and build those models. 

You’ve got to have the right level of knowledge and product expertise to be able to build a consumer user interface that allows people to get access to it. Then you’ve got to have a market reach to make it relevant. It’s ticked so many boxes for us, but it also shone a light on the true product capabilities we have as a business and what we can do. 

I like it a lot because there is so much discrepancy in prices. Originally, a few operators didn’t want to participate because they were nervous about their pricing. But what I think has shown is that different sportsbooks are very good at certain markets but not so good at others. There is enormous value there for consumers if they are willing to shop around with our product.

EGR: Could you expand some more on the subscription model and what your response would be to consumers that might balk at paying for the product?

SS: It’s an interesting conversation because we’ve had some really good feedback as well. But – and this particularly happened in the UK, where traditionally we’ve given a huge amount of information away for free – if you look at other industries as a comparable, if you want premium access to the latest films or the latest TV shows without any advertising, you end up paying for it, right? 

So, the notion of paying for ad-free content that gives you a really good experience as a consumer is now becoming a lot more mainstream. There are also other parallels in the publishing industry. If you look at The Times, The Wall Street Journal or any other major public publication that has traditionally delivered journalism paid for by advertising, they now have subscriptions.

In the UK, it felt like a natural step to offer more of an ad-free environment to the consumers. I want a clean consumer experience that delivers huge amounts of value, in terms of allowing people to get access to AI-driven tips at scale that they can then personalise and make it less about advertising and less about maximising operator revenues, but instead gearing it more towards consumer value.

The market will decide whether we are charging the right price point for that experience. What I would say is the UK is a tougher market to operate a subscription business in than the US, where it’s a lot more commonplace that people pay for multiple subscriptions. We’ll probably see the uptake in the US moving  faster, but the UK will still get there.

I want to provide a level playing field to consumers to get access to the best technology that increases the probability of them winning. Our opportunity as a business is to continue to innovate, provide consumers with a better experience and one that matches the value that we’re creating. 

If we don’t get that right, they’re not going to buy it and then it won’t work. If we get it right and we deliver more value, we’re going to see growth – and we are seeing growth.

EGR: On the M&A front, what have SuperScommesse and Quarter4 added to the wider FairPlay business? And is there more M&A in the pipeline?

SS: When you’re PE-backed like us, there’s always appetite to look at additional acquisitions, especially if they’re profitable in a good market and then have good synergies with a core business.

With SuperScommesse, I’m really impressed with the team that we acquired. What we were really attracted to about the team and the job they’ve done is providing concierge services to consumers to help them sign up across multiple operators and teach them how to use the tools and the technology. 

There was a nice alignment between what we were building under the FairPlay network around betting technology and how we could bring that to bear in the Italian market. So far so good. 

They’ve done a brilliant job in helping revamp oddschecker in Italy. The growth rates that we’re seeing in Italy are phenomenal and it’s been a great acquisition for us. Any brand that operates where we feel that our technology and platforms can have a significant benefit and drive upside and growth, we will look at the territory and the brand.

Quarter4 has really exploded across our organisation. We’re now using it on oddschecker UK, powering our subscription products with it. And we’re going to do a lot more that we haven’t launched yet. We’re having interesting conversations with sportsbooks around their trading analytics and their pricing of micro markets and things like that. 

The bet builder angle is quite an interesting one where, in theory, we can start to guide on what we would think would be a good price for some of the bet builders using that technology. So Quarter4 has just become incredibly well-placed across our business.

EGR: What are the expectations for Brazil when the market opens on 1 January given you’ve launched a localised oddschecker product there?

SS: It’s an important market and everyone has outlined it. It’s been a great market for us. It’s a market we’ve prioritised. We’ve delivered a lot of our core technology into the Brazilian market to support the oddschecker brand. Across Latin America, we’re ranked quite highly in terms of being the number one or number two affiliate, which is brilliant. But what I really like about it is it’s a very sustainable market, obviously with a heavy focus on football and our technology works well in a market like that and in other Latin American markets.

EGR: Where does FairPlay fit into the US market given that PASPA fell in 2018? Are we seeing a slowdown in state legislation?

SS: We run the oddschecker brand there. We’ve done a nice job of building an audience and we’re deploying our technology to support and get parity in the US. That’s an ongoing exercise that we should finish in H1 next year, where we really have a similar experience for consumers in the US that we have in the UK. That hasn’t always been the case.

We’ve launched a subscription product and we think it’s a great market for that. The Quarter4 acquisition was instrumental in us unlocking that opportunity and we’ll continue to build our subscription business.

But the exciting thing beyond those is Confido, which is going gangbusters in the US. There’s a real opportunity for an affiliate network in the US that does a great job acting on behalf of the sportsbooks in identifying the right media and publisher partnerships and making sure that we develop those relationships on their behalf. 

Confido, for me, is an exciting opportunity. Rather than it being all about acquisition, it’s now turning into being a market that’s far more about compelling content and then engagement with consumers.

I feel comfortable with our strategy. Oddschecker didn’t steam into the market in 2018 and didn’t really push that hard in 2019 and 2020. In fact, they missed a big chunk of revenue. We didn’t get addicted to the state launches and the boom-bust mentality. We missed not only a lot of the first phase opportunities, but also the risks and threats that a lot of our competitors have carried.

We’ve been profitable, growing and able to invest in technology, our platforms, components and products – all at a time when many of our competitors really struggled to continue that level of innovation because they’re stuck with a large workforce and revenues have dried up. I feel well positioned to use a variety of business models and technologies to capitalise on this next phase of the of the US market.

EGR: Finally, what are you looking to achieve over the next 12-24 months?

SS: I’m really excited about how much we’ve invested in platforms, components and products. A lot of that investment hasn’t necessarily seen the light of day yet, and the level of innovation that we’ve delivered in this past year is hugely exciting. I’m really excited about bringing that to market and seeing how that helps all of our different business units, customers and partners.

For me, the next two years is about commercialising that innovation and investment as well as seeing it take hold and shape in lots of different markets. 

I’m also really excited about how we can grow into some new territories and markets at pace because we’ve really been preparing ourselves to be able to do that.

Personally, I’ve had quite a period of reflection. I think I ran at life 100mph – being an age-group triathlete, I went to the World Triathlon Age-Group Championship three times. Then I’m trying to be a CEO, a really good dad to three teenagers at very formative stages of their lives, and a husband. My challenge was to balance those things with equal effect. 

I love my job. One thing I was very clear on, even when I got quite ill earlier this year, was that I didn’t want to stop working. I actually love work. I love being involved in sports, sports media, data and technology. They’re all really cool things for me to stay involved with and I’m pretty passionate about it.

For me, it’s having a fun and varied life, prioritising right things, being as healthy as I possibly can and making sure I’m really present in everything I do.