Rasmus Soejmark podcast transcript
Interview with Rasmus Soejmark from EveryMatrix
Speaker key:
RT: Ronan Tighe
RS: Ramus Soejmark
RT: Hi, I’m Ronan Tighe from Foviance, and welcome to podcast 14 in our Innovations series. This week I’m joined by Rasmus Soejmark from Bet Brain. Rasmus, thank you very much for agreeing to take part today.
RS: It’s my pleasure.
RT: First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your background at Bet Brain?
RS: My background is, well it dates back to my time in university, where I spent my two years at the Masters focusing on sports betting. I decided to do my dissertation as well about sports betting, the reality of the sports bet. I conducted 20 interviews, transcribed this, analysed it, and then wrote around 170 pages, and it all went quite well, so it gave me a theoretical background into understanding how sports betting was consumed. Furthermore, I gave some lectures, I was doing a session, for instance, at Alberg University, for professors and PhD students about how you consume sports betting as well, and I likening it then (? 01:05) aesthetics, communication, experience, economy, all of this stuff, so I had quite a good experience about that part of it, so when I had to choose a job, I was just thinking that this was very interesting, so why not try and get a job within the gaming industry, and that would normally mean that you would have to go to London or somewhere else to work for one of the big sports betting operators. What I did then was, I actually found in a newspaper an advertisement from a company called Bet Brain, and I applied for the job, went to an interview, and they hired me for the position of doing sales for them. Then I was starting with these guys, and yeah, I was introduced to sports betting via this comparison service they had, it was new to me back then, but that put me in touch with all the operators.
I then later moved to London to be closer to my clients, which was the likes of Ladbrokes, Betfair 365, William Hill, and I’ve now been at Bet Brain for four years, and recently, which is actually last week, I was offered the opportunity to go and work for the company, EveryMatrix, and EveryMatrix is a B2B software provider, they have three core products, which is OddsMatrix, which is a banner matrix, and GamMatrix. OddsMatrix, to mention this briefly, is a full managed widely old sports book, currently it’s being used by the likes of Chilli Gaming, Poker Heaven, Tower Gaming, No IQ, and a lot of other operators have signed to use it, so it’s mainly targeted towards casino, poker, bingo rooms, or all that kind of like gaming operators who wants to have the option of using sports betting as a retention tool as well, or you can use it like precision as well. I guess that’s enough advertising.
RT: What are the other companies involved in EveryMatrix?
RS: It’s BanaMatrix, it’s the old air factory, which was taken care of by me at Bet Spring, but it was then recently sold to EveryMatrix, and is now being rebranded as BanaMatrix. What they do is, what we do with this product is that we allow the sports bet operators to create really nice, unique banners that contains art content, real time data if they want to show in-running betting or prizes in the banners, they can do this nice and easily, saving a lot of resources on this normal design process, and they don’t have to hard code the information into the banners.
RT: Have you seen where operators have used that, they’ve had larger click throughs than let’s say using static banners?
RS: Well yeah, because it’s just more relevant information that, a lot of banners are based on bonus offers and promotional stuff, but this is targeted towards new customers, and a lot of the customers on the sites already have an account with this operator, so they’re just seeing our relevant advertising, whereas if you show the prizes, and as soon as some games start, they can switch to in-running prizes, so it’s much more relevant information, and for an affiliate to have this on his site would give him more of the feeling of showing more content, like advertising, instead of pure advertising, and as we know, people tend to click less and less on banners, because they feel it’s annoying advertising; they want to have their own choices, and these banners as well, these BanaMatrix banners are much more interactive, they allow you to actually play around with them, you can even see live scores in the banners – all this kind of stuff, which is much more up-to-date with the current trend of social media, empowerment of the users, and all this kind of stuff, yeah, so definitely.
Also the fact that you can strategise, and you can go in and create kind of like one banner, which is normally a banner, then you create a code into that, this code can contain more than one banner, so you can have four banners, let’s say you have four banners in one code, and these four banners then have a weight of 25% each, so if a user comes in, he’ll see one banner, if he comes back, he might see another banner. This allows you to test for different banners in one code on one site, then you go to your reporting system, and you have a look, and you can actually see which banner performs the best, and of course wise as we all are, we’re gonna exclude all the other banners and use the one that has the best performance.
One more thing is that, I really have to mention this, because I think it’s an amazing feature – it allows you to also use that one banner code, you give to one affiliate, and based on this very smart IP tracking, you can make sure that a user that comes from, let’s say you have an affiliate who has users from ten different countries, at Sporting Bet there’s banner coding to the site; if that user comes from, let’s say, Portugal, it would be in Portuguese; if the user comes from, let’s say Denmark, he will see the banner in Danish, so it will automatically be updated based on the IP address of the user, and that could mean all GIFs, all the art content, so the art content creation will be around Danish matches. The bonus offer as well varies with countries, we know that, you know, you have one international offer, you have one targeted towards Danish users and Danish krone, and one in let’s say in the UK, which is pounds, right? – and you can allow that to be shown within one banner code – just imagine the time this could save for affiliate managers, that they can give out one code and they know that this is automatically optimised, based on users from different countries.
RT: You run the very popular Sports Betting Community, which recent event was last Thursday in Piccadilly? – I just wanted to know what prompted you to start that up?
RS: Well, first of all, thank you for saying we were the “very popular” Sports Betting Community, that’s very nice of you, but no, I agree, it has gained in popularity, definitely, because actually we already had three of them, as you mentioned, the last one was this Thursday in Piccadilly, and during the evening there was actually more than 100 people, so it was quite nice, and we had one back in March, and we had one back in May as well, so this Thursday was actually the third one. We aim to have around four or six a year, which means every second or third month we’ll do one. The whole idea behind it is to simply try and get more focus back to sports betting; all the conferences I’ve attended over the last three, four years, besides bet markets in Vienna or Asia as well, is actually all about poker, casino and bingo. If you go to these conferences, you can meet a lot of sports betting people as well for sure, and it’s a good conference, it’s definitely, but the thing is that I just feel that sports betting has been around for years, and you have sports on its own, it’s just a huge industry, and suddenly you had poker, casino, bingo – all of this just growing, and people putting much more resource and focus into this, so I’m just trying to see if it’s possible to gather some of the good old sports betting forces together, and allow them to maybe rebuild some of the community that used to be around sports betting, because everyone likes to talk about sports on a daily basis, and sports betting is just one more part of it, and that’s what we want it to be, we want it to be part of the daily sports talks.
So I can mention, for instance, that we actually managed to get two sponsors last time, which was IO Bank and EveryMatrix, so we had foods, we had beers and all this stuff, and again there was free beers, free food, and the whole event itself was free, so it’s just a free way for good people to network.
RT: Do you have any future plans for it? Are you happy just to have a quarterly event?
RS: Well, looking back at some of the people that attended, we’re talking about Send a bet, Bet Fair, Betalogic, Autotrader, event the Danish, the very Danish popular magazine called Tips Blood, which is kind of like the Danish Racing Post, Ladbrokes, Eurobet, Bet Spring as well, EveryMatrix, IO Bank – there’s a lot of good people there, and I think when you’re backed up by these kind of people, you feel that you can definitely go on and have a few more, and then see where it takes you, and the people itself being represented were like, guys like Dave McDowell, Gareth Wong, Jim Thompson, Ronan from Foviance! – so some good people as well, and you know, I have been thinking about, if there’s any opportunities, but we really want to keep this as a non-commercial business, it’s not about making money out of this at all, it’s just by putting good heads together.
RT: You currently have the LinkedIn group, so if people are interested in finding more about it, they can go to the LinkedIn group?
RS: Yes, definitely, there’s currently almost 400 members there, some very good people there, and it’s open to everyone who has some kind of stake or interest in sports betting. It needs to be sports betting people, yes, we are trying to keep it within certain limits, not to get a lot of people in that are not really involved in sports betting at all.
RT: That makes sense, I’ll include a link to the LinkedIn group on our website beside the podcast. I just want to talk about the experience of “consuming sports betting”, as you put it. What do you think the current user experience is like, and who do you think is good at doing it better than others?
RS: I always felt like bet365 were doing an amazing job, because they always have had a lot of in-running games, and they backed it up with a lot of good TV transmitted games, and all this stuff, and besides that, they have an amazing offering, in terms of different markets across the world. It’s like, if you’re a user from any country, you’ll find local games, plus you’ll find worldwide games, so you have pretty much everything, I think it’s a good side. There’s a few things I maybe don’t like about that side, that would be maybe how you find the games, kind of like how it’s structured, and maybe the bet slip itself, but in general I think they’re good, but I think there is definitely room for improvement.
RT: There’s been a lot of talk recently about the business models that affiliates are using, especially in poker, which I don’t really want to touch on now, as you’re sportsbook focused, but in terms of the sportsbook model, do you think that’s currently working? – or do you think it will change at some point in the future?
RS: Well, I think first of all, I still think that affiliate marketing is a fine idea, I like the concept, I guess it’s good that you have to perform, and if you perform, you are paid your commission. But the problem is that sports betting affiliates, it’s not as lucrative a business as a programmed casino has proven to be, because the margins are smaller on sports betting, and you see often that it’s the savvy punters that comes online, because a lot of the less savvy punters, they don’t really bother going online to a tipster site or odds comparison site, because they know what they want to bet on anyway, so they’re more likely to go to, let’s say, Sporting Life, TEAMtalk Media, to go to a new site and find whatever information about the teams, go to BBC, and then they place a bet. So the problem is that the affiliate managers, or the whole affiliate marketing operating side, doesn’t always understand that it’s hard for the affiliate to just go ahead and reinvest into his own business, because he’s never really certain if his players are going to have a win or losing month, and if that’s the case, it’s hard for him to spend all his own resources and time on something, if he’s not going to make any money. Hence I would like to see that there was more, an open forum for discussion around more than just a rithsure, there should definitely be the opportunity of a CPA or hybrid deal, where you combine the two? Or even some kind of fixed fee, because the fixed fee, that’s maybe more of a risk for the operator, but on the other hand it’s a high risk for the affiliate to go on a rithsure right away, because he’s going to have to wait for his commission to come in, and without any money, how is he going to build a better side that’s going to promote the operator in a better way. So I think there is some kind of gap there that could be worked on in all the football sides to be even better, and get a mutual beneficial relationship, so yeah, I would like to see some more happening there, because you really really want sports betting affiliates to do something about some of the sites, because I think sports betting affiliates, there’s a lot of old sites around, and there’s a lot of the same sites, free betting sites, tipster sites, odds comparison sites.
RT: You talked a lot there about the challenges of the affiliates – what do you think are the biggest challenges for the actual sportsbook operators?
RS: Well, the biggest challenges? – well, it’s just what I mentioned actually, as one of them, definitely, to understand the affiliates a bit better, it’s not just a necessary evil, that affiliates are something that are there, and you just have to pay them. It’s marketeers, it’s people representing your company, so I would hope that there would be more two-way communication in the future, definitely.
I also think that, or I would like to see that there would be more focus being put back on the sportsbook operators in general, because you have to realise that a sportsbook operator is not only sports betting, it’s also the whole product base of poker, casino, bingo, skill games, right? So I would like to see that this whole brand in itself put more focus back on the sports betting, because sports betting is quite an expensive business, with all the odds compilers, trailers, and the whole thing about making this work, but if you want to make good money in sports betting, you need to have good art compilers and trailers as well, so you can’t really just take resources away from sports betting and put it into poker and casino and all of this, and expect that sports betting is going to grow as a good business; you need to keep the resources there, so I think maybe that too many resources have been taken away from sports betting over the last five years or so, with the boom of poker, bingo and all this, so I guess it’s not unexpected that sports betting lost some of its momentum, or whatever. But then live betting, of course, has come into really like, put focus back as well, so some focus has come back, definitely, and you do see, I think I read, Sporting Bet was like almost 50% of all live stakes for in-running betting, and they expected to be around 70% in two years’ time, so that has a massive potential as well, and again this is something that could be an entry for the operators to tap into the sports market, to convince more sports consumers of wanting to try sports betting, because it’s now possible to bet on pretty much everything through the game, so with mobile phones and perimeter boards where you have live prizes running, and “call this number”, “go to that site now and place an in-running bet on this guy to score the next goal”, is just going to add so much more to the whole experience, being at a stadium, being with your friends, so this is a whole bunch of opportunities around live betting. And I think as well, what I mentioned was some of these community features.
RT: Finally, what enhancements do you think we’ll see in this sector in the next year?
RS: Social media, definitely, but I don’t think it’s about turning your whole site into like a Facebook, definitely not, it’s just starting off small, by finding things that could be really valuable, if you add them together in the right way, and here I’m talking about competitions, like quizzes, story telling from the operator himself, speaking about when they started the business, how it was started there, what they’re doing today, how they perform the in-running betting – just opening up about who they are, and putting this all together in kind of like a, it could be a microsite, it could be like a link on the top menu redirecting the user to the subsite, where it’s kind of like more of a community feeling, so it feels like it’s part of the site, but it’s not the whole site, if you know what I mean, so I think that’s the way forward, to try and take some of these elements, and get some value out of this.
RT: Rasmus, thanks very much for your time, and I found the interview really interesting, and I’m sure our audience will too.
RS: Thank you, Ronan.