SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Brendan Tinnelly, Head of Paid Social at Sportradar, shares his views on betting on tennis and explains why operators are turning to paid social to engage tennis bettors and boost their customer acquisition strategies.
Where does tennis as a global sport sit in terms of its importance to betting operators and can you tell us more about the content it can generate to engage bettors?
Tennis is huge. It’s one of the world’s most popular betting sports with a global turnover exceeding 180bn Euros last year. From a Sportradar perspective, this year we have already accepted more than 50 million betting tickets through our Managed Trading Services (MTS) on behalf of our clients, which gives you some idea of its importance amongst operators and their players.
The sport has a year-round calendar, creating an abundance of content to entertain and engage bettors. In the last 12 months we’ve covered more than 90,000 tennis matches and provide our clients with more than 75 unique betting markets for each match.
How is Sportradar helping its operator partners maximise their share of the €180bn in annual betting revenue generated by tennis?
From a marketing perspective, we’re providing our operator clients with the products and services they need to more efficiently market their tennis offerings to customers. Given the number of tennis matches on offer, the advanced technical capabilities within ad:s, our data driven digital marketing solution, is helping operators to improve the targeting of their adverts while enhancing end user engagement by delivering more relevant creative.
Increasingly we’re using artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve a better understanding of customer behaviour in order to engineer content that’s tailored to the interests and preferences of individual fans. It’s these AI-driven personalisation capabilities that underpin our new tennis specific paid social media solution. The technology allows operators to optimise the performance of their paid social media advertising through the delivery of personalised dynamic creative and real-time odds.
What’s the big draw of paid social media and how does Sportradar help operators use it effectively as a means of reaching tennis fans and enriching their sports betting experience?
Operators are starting to understand the potential of paid social as an acquisition channel. With more than three billion people actively using social media each month globally, it possesses significant advertising reach, and the algorithms within each platform allow audiences to be segmented and highly targeted.
There are over a billion tennis fans worldwide and the sport is incredibly popular on social media, with the biggest players and competitions amassing global followings in the tens of millions.
However, marketers still need the expertise and technology to successfully execute their acquisition strategies across social media. Operators can truly optimise their campaigns by leaning on platform specific algorithms, like those used within our ad:s paid social service, which process customer data to hyper-target a greater number of tennis fans with personalised dynamic adverts in a cost effective way. The result is higher click-through-rates and conversions, with marketing budgets going further due to reduced operational costs and advertising waste.
Sportradar’s ad:s paid social service is live across the Meta platforms of Facebook and Instagram, as well as Snapchat, providing operators with the ability to acquire customers across some of the world’s most popular social media channels.
AI will inevitably play a greater role in proceedings. How does Sportradar intend to harness this technology to best serve the needs of operators?
The increased application of AI is supercharging digital marketing campaigns, particularly across paid social. By processing the wealth of data operators have at their disposal, the AI within ad:s can achieve a deeper understanding of customers’ interests to build individual profiles, then serve content based on these online behaviours and preferences.
For operators looking to capitalise on the tennis action, AI can utilise data to engineer the right message for the right customer and deliver it on the right social platform and at the right time.
These algorithms also enable relevant tennis betting information to be generated and included into advertising creative, providing customers with deeper insights to inform and enrich their sports betting experience.
This not only creates brand loyalty and engages the end-user more deeply, but increases click-through-rates and conversion, allowing operators to really generate the most value from their tennis offerings.
And lastly can you expand on how automation technology can generate scalable, dynamic ads that keep pace with the very latest marketing movements?
During tennis’ peak tournaments, operators need to promote and supply the odds and dynamic adverts for the massive volume of games being played. This puts huge pressures on their creative studios and is where automation technology is a real game changer. Automation can be configured to scale and personalise advertising creative across paid social to satisfy the high demand from fans.
One automation technology that sits within our ad:s paid social service that is helping operators generate personalised and scalable dynamic adverts is Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO). The DCO is part of ad:s Dynamic Display tool and uses AI and machine learning to process an operator’s deep pool of data to curate personalised ads for fans.
Over half a billion weekly ad impressions are processed by our DCO tool, meaning automated ads can be tailored to the content preferences of individual customers and the brand standards of operators.
This is truly transforming how operators deliver creative ads during their busiest schedules, as single templates can provide an unlimited supply of personalised creative adverts to fans for the biggest matches. The benefits of this are many: fans receive the content they care about most, and operators achieve better acquisition and save on vital resources and ad spend.
