SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Mark Langdon, Group Sports Director at Spotlight Sports Group, explains to SBC News why operators and affiliates need to think seriously about adding value through AI content that truly hits the spot.
SBC News: Tell us about Spotlight iQ – what does it do and what challenges does it solve for operators?
Mark Langdon: Spotlight iQ is our AI-powered content engine built specifically for the horseracing and sports betting industry. Our newest product is a long-form football betting preview service covering 48 domestic leagues, each with two selections per match.
The goal is to provide bespoke pre-match football betting content at scale. To do that for every league would be expensive for operators to support using human writers alone.
Spotlight iQ enables operators to have accurate, trusted and insightful information on global markets in any language.
SBC: How does Spotlight Sports Group utilise AI in the production of this product and what separates this from other AI-generated content?
ML: Unlike off-the-shelf LLMs, Spotlight iQ has been built specifically to provide betting content. It draws on the knowledge and integrity we’ve developed as publishers in this space for nearly 40 years with journalists at the heart of ensuring all outputs are best in class.
Crucially, we understand what makes bettors tick. Our football betting database has been tailored to generate interesting and bet-stimulating storytelling that isn’t available elsewhere. We are in a unique position of being able to provide both media and betting expertise, which is put to excellent use for this product.
We have a vast selection of automated prompts which help to generate the previews. We run that alongside our predictions model, generating ratings for each team as well as a goal expectancy from each fixture. This allows us to offer authentic betting selections which are based on decades of proprietary data.
SBC: How can you ensure that the automated football previews are accurate and contextualised for audiences?
ML: Having built our long-standing reputation on accuracy and knowledge, it was vital that this product was up to standard before we released it. There is no secret formula to achieving this goal. It is just a lot of hard work, continually training the model and refining the previews and only publishing them when they were good enough – following extensive feedback – just as with our human-written journalism.
Because our model has been shaped by journalists with enormous experience in the sports betting space, there is an authenticity to the outputs. They have been shaped by real editorial voices, with real expertise in their field.
Even our data scientists and content generation teams have journalistic backgrounds, which really helps to contextualise the previews. It means we have developed prompt structures and a tone of voice that reflects the way people who enjoy betting actually talk about football.
And context is key. I was keen to make sure our models understand that not all results are equal, so within our storytelling we can describe, for example, how a team performs when odds-on, contrasting that with their performance as underdogs, to build a picture around the fixture with betting at its core.
SBC: Similarly, the content can be generated in multiple languages. What methods do you have to ensure this is accurate?
ML: Accuracy and cultural nuance are critical. Any translation process goes through the same rigorous checks thanks to our team of journalists around the globe, who add local expertise in the training process for seamless translation.
We have successfully translated these previews into Spanish and Korean. Each language presented its own challenges, but we resolved them. We are confident those learnings will allow us to offer Spotlight iQ in any language without a dip in quality from the original source.
SBC: What makes the AI generated previews a more efficient investment for operators compared to human writers?
ML: It’s all about scalability. When you consider the size of the task of producing in-depth, contextual betting previews for competitions all over the world, it’s a service that would take even our large and experienced editorial team days to produce. Now it is available at the press of a button, delivered in any way operators require.
Spotlight iQ offers coverage where there was none previously, increasing engagement for sportsbooks while reducing the cost per article. It guarantees consistent quality, which is key for user experience and brand trust.
It also frees up our editorial team to concentrate on premium and bespoke content. Perhaps Spotlight iQ isn’t what an operator would require for huge Champions League games and that is where human content teams come into their own. However, this service means we can deliver content at scale, for leagues such as the Japanese second division, creating an affordable and effective 24/7 product.
SBC: Similarly, what benefits are there to the end-user?
ML: Relevance, reliability and engaging previews that offer clear information to support decision-making. We think football bettors deserve better than generic match facts and out-of-context selections. It’s about content that drives betting engagement.
SBC: How is SSG positioning this product in the market to ensure it is the de-facto home for sports betting and racing content?
ML: Our approach for Spotlight iQ is the same as it is for all of our products: developed through the eyes of the end consumer. This is in our DNA, having produced racing and sports betting content for our own audiences every day for nearly 40 years.
Our ability to extend this same high-calibre content to our partners fits with our ambition to drive the widest possible audience engagement with racing and sports betting fans globally.
SBC: Can you give us examples of how the product has been used during the current football season?
ML: We are using these previews on our affiliate site FreeSuperTips.com and have not seen any negative impact on our search rankings.
Google’s stance is that it rewards high-quality content, however it is produced. Their rater guidelines around expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trust (EEAT) are essentially what our brand has been built on, thanks to a rich heritage which started out with the Racing Post first being published in 1986.
Our data also shows that AI page views and engagement have held their own against our human-written previews. We are constantly working to develop the product and will scale up the coverage for the start of next season.
