Perfecting product for the World Cup
BetVictor’s Eoin Ryan on why bet builder products are the most significant sportsbook innovation since cash-out
Over the next few weeks, all sportsbook operators will be showing their hand with regard to their 2018 World Cup promotional plans, product development initiatives and marketing campaigns. Planning for an event of such magnitude started over a year ago in our case, with a product development initiative and a creative marketing construct we believe is capable of taking more than our fair share of market within an area we perceive to be the current battleground for punter affection.
That area is ‘bet requests’, and in our case our planning came to fruition when we recently announced our proprietary #PriceItUp Builder which we perceive to be the most powerful ‘bet builder’ on the market, to complement our already very popular #PriceItUp request market.
Bet request markets such as Sky Bet’s eponymous Request-A-Bet have undoubtedly been the most interesting and popular product innovation since cash-out. It is hard to remember another product innovation that has become so popular with punters and has also been jumped upon so quickly by the majority of operators.
One of the more amusing observations in the development of that product has been the initial need for firms to go ‘back to basics’ in terms of their offering. When we began our product journey at BetVictor 16 months ago, the process was entirely manual – a hat tip to the bookmaking brains that remain in our trading room today.
Requests were taken in, primarily via Twitter, and passed onto a sportsbook team to manually create the bet outcome within our trading platform. This was subsequently sent to our football trading team to #PriceItUp. Yet it soon became apparent that its sheer popularity and ‘scalability’ was too much for our trading team and we began to automate the process.
Automating the process
After several milestones, we arrived at the point of releasing our #PriceItUp Builder. The uptake has exceeded what we thought were challenging targets and expectations. There are a number of reasons, I believe, why these bet request products are proving so popular with customers.
From the customers’ perspective, it is engaging and fun to be able to create a bet that gives you an interest in up to 10 different areas of a match. It is an entirely new way of watching a game unfold and makes the traditional experience of simply backing a side to win look positively pedestrian. Prices offered are generally big and meet the individual needs of the ‘small stake, big return’ appetite shift that most operators are now seeing.
From an operator’s viewpoint, the product offers attractive margins by nature of the fact that a typical bet will consist of at least four selections. The bets are also related, so whilst a price may appear ‘huge’ to a customer, there will generally be enough margin that a bookmaker is happy to lay – though some liabilities get very scary very fast.
The product also opens up lots of future development opportunities in different sports and indeed different territories. Add in complementary features such as cash-out and a Bet Tracker, and you sense that IT are going to be busy with this one for some time yet.
On a wider point, the deconstruction of what was a typical bet blocker: ‘related outcomes’ and the reconstruction of that as a growth opportunity is a very interesting example of how technology is helping firms to develop products in areas that simply were not considered previously.
Over the coming weeks I expect you will see several firms unveil their own version of a bet builder. In our case, we’re betting big on our product coming out on top when the World Cup kicks off on 14 June.
As head of product for BetVictor, Eoin Ryan formulates the vision for product development, manages priorities and oversees the delivery of roadmap items. Prior to BetVictor, he worked at Betfair and before that he led the management team at a privately-owned sports spread betting business.