Marcus Wareham podcast transcript
Interview with Marcus Wareham of Mfuse
RT: Ronan Tighe
MW: Marcus Wareham
RT: Hi, I’m Ronan Tighe from Foviance, and welcome to podcast 11 in our Innovations series. Today I’m joined by my guest, Marcus Wareham, CEO of Mfuse. Marcus, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with me today.
MW: No problem, thank you very much for inviting me.
RT: First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your background and Mfuse.
MW: Well, Mfuse is the mobile sports betting business primarily, set up seven years ago, just coming up to our seventh anniversary, very early in the space, really tried to sort of dig mobile out of the hole that was “WAP is cr*p”, which is where we started, and saw the future of what was going to be possible on mobiles, but very early stages at the time. It kick started with the first client going live in September/October 2003, which was Sporting Index, and really we progressed on from there, and went round all of the other bookmakers, showed them what we could do, what was coming, the future of mobile technology, the improved usability, frankly, the improved input mechanisms: screens – colour screens were quite new at the time, and really since then have focused on selling that product or a sub-section thereof to all the bookmakers out there, and as of today cover pretty much all the major players in the UK, moving out into Europe, so that’s sort of, the essence of Mfuse is really sports betting.
RT: When you started out, did you consider going direct to the consumer and setting up your own sports book, purely dedicated to mobile?
MW: No, not really, I guess partly because that’s never been my background, I’ve always been in technology of some description, and I recognised clearly the difference between being a marketeer and being a technology provider, and effectively playing to your strengths in that respect, and the bottom line is, there’s absolutely no way we could raise the funds at the time to start a new brand and really go out there and compete, although mobile was new, sports betting isn’t, wasn’t at the time, and it was really wasn’t to compete against the big brands against Ladbrokes, etc, it was more to provide them with the technology and say, “Look – this is complicated, but how you engage us, we can do it, you can then look after the marketing, which is what you’re very good at, and we’ll worry about the complexities of mobile.”
RT: What are the complexities? – so what’s the biggest challenge of offering that great experience to the users?
MW: Well, mobiles – mobiles offer a range of difficulties over traditional internet formats: you’ve got screen size, it’s not a nice big screen such as PCs have, you’ve got an input mechanism that’s a low input mechanism, it’s either single numbers or sometimes small qwerty keyboards, we’ve got touch screen coming on now, you’ve got signal strength, you’re not always in a good network coverage area, people still want to bet, and in fact if you go to a racecourse or a football match, the signal strength tends to be even lower there because of the mass number of people, and you’ve got different operating systems on handsets, and all the different handset types that are out there, so the complexities are far reaching really, and all of those barriers have to be resolved, because at the end of the day consumers will use products that they’re comfortable using, and you can do a certain amount to help that, but ultimately if something isn’t usable, or is clunky, then they get turned off by the experience.
RT: Is the amount of people, the amount of customers, increasing for the operators as well in terms of is the uptake increasing? When the phones are getting better, are more and more people starting to use them?
MW: Yeah, I think there’s two drivers: one is clearly consumers are getting more used to using their mobile phone for different services, and that really sort of moves on to the second point, which is, it’s about awareness, that these services are available. I’m actually a big believer in the BBC frankly, I think they do it for the internet and they’re now doing it for mobile, so there’s presenting at the end of the news of an evening – “For more news, go to the BBC mobile news site”, and that breeds awareness effectively, people then go, “Oh – look, mobile’s gone up a gear, it can use this, it’s browseable, it’s useable, etc” , and that leads them on to look for what other services they’ve got. So there’s a lot that can still be done to make consumers aware that these services are available, but handsets improving definitely help that, people, if they get a new handset, they buy it for a reason – it’s got some nice funky tools on it, some toys, Apple iPhone, a good example – they start browsing around and discovering a world of mobile content effectively.
RT: How do you think Apple’s entrance into the market is going to affect the services you deliver?
MW: I think it’s fantastic, again back to that awareness point, I think it’s raised the bar, which is good, because the higher that bar is raised, OK, the bigger the expectations, but the more people pile into the service, and the better the quality of the products are. I can offer a great quality sports book, but if that’s the only thing that the consumer uses on their mobile, then they’re less likely to use it as often as I’d like them to, whereas if they use a whole range of services on their mobile, betting just becomes part of it, so the BBC are good for that, Apple have definitely raised the bar in that respect, and Apple sold their phone, promoted/marketed their phone, on the back of internet services that were available to the consumer, so again it’s all about starting that awareness programme – “Oh, there’s mobile internet stuff out there”, “Oh, that’s what I can do”, so even people who aren’t Apple phone purchasers suddenly realise that there’s a whole bunch of stuff out there that they can go access and use.
RT: Apple aren’t very friendly towards gaming sites at the moment – do you think that’s going to change?
MW: I don’t think it’s going to change in the short term. They aren’t friendly, however they can’t stop browser-based services, they can stop application downloads, because they control the gateway, but they can’t stop browser services, and our intention is in fact, it’s work in progress at the moment but our intention will be to provide a browser, but an Apple-specific browser interface for our sportsbook, so again a lot of it’s about perception. From a consumer point of view, it’ll almost look like an application on their phone, on their iPhone, but from our point of view it’s delivered using a web technology, but the browse experience, the way you navigate, etc, will be very Apple iPhone-esque, so we can get round those things.
RT: How do you think the sportsbook operators are currently integrating their mobile with online channels?
MW: I think from a technology perspective, it’s very well integrated. You have to be very careful, when you design a product for a mobile, that you don’t put in features that are not relevant to a mobile user, and in sports betting it’s quite easy to quantify those, because there’s no point in opening up the Ladbrokes application today, and at the top of the list is the Grand National 2010, relevance to the mobile user at that point in time – pretty non-existent. But in terms of the features and the functionality that the application carries, and the order in which they’re presented, we pretty much provide everything that the online service provides, so technologically we’re very very integrated, and in some instances we provide, a mobile actually provides above and beyond what a user can expect online. We handle the quick deposits on bets, for example, so if you haven’t quite got enough money in your account, it’ll say, “Do you want to top up?” – by the amount that you’ve asked to bet, click a button and it does the deposit and places the bet, and that sort of goes back to the usability of mobile, you don’t want to press the button four times, you just want to go “Yes” – taken care of.
In terms of how they promote, different story altogether. My ideal would be that Ladbrokes (I keep using Ladbrokes, I should probably change), William Hill don’t advertise William Hill internet, they just advertise William Hill as a multichannel offering – that isn’t happening yet. It will happen, I’m sure, I’m sure again there are some technological barriers to get over that, there’s some political barriers to get over, frankly, with some organisations, because you’ve got retail, online, mobile, sometimes interactive TV – they’re all pretty much, or the big organisations certainly, they’re all pretty much integrated into one wallet, so technically it’s possible, but their marketing departments seem to deal with them separately. The time will come, but I don’t think there is a single brand out there, bookmaker brand, that just has a single marketing message irrespective of channel, that’s yet to happen.
RT: Do you think it’s more difficult for the companies that have the retail, so I suppose someone like Bet365 has just come to mind?
MW: Yes, definitely, you start getting into conversations about cannibalisation with the managers of the retail shops, we ask all the time if they’ll promote our service in the shops, the mobile team get excited about the prospect, but then there’s somewhere else in the organisation, there are barriers to stop that happening – who would I be to cast aspersions, that’s an issue of where the money’s going and who’s going to lose out on that.
RT: You mentioned that you’re predominantly sports book, or you’re moving over to casino – in terms of the casino games that you’re going to offer, what do you think will work on a mobile as opposed to this won’t work completely, is there certain games you think?
MW: The big challenge for me is, casino games, or any form of game, where it’s a server-based game, so you are just playing against the house, whether it’s a casino game, fixed odds game, even bingo to a certain extent, you need to have a trigger to get a player to play, and in sports betting there’s a natural trigger, because there’s a kick off, or the race starts, or whatever it is, and that’s built into time, you can’t move it. Casino games, or game play, is very much entertainment, so you need to have a trigger – why is the guy sitting at the bus stop going to open his phone and play blackjack? Something has to trigger his mind thought process, whatever, to do that, and so I feel that’s why we’ve been so long in coming to market with these products, because I feel that’s very much about awareness, but I think we are getting to the point where, if you are in a situation where you’ve got some time to spend, you’re waiting for your mate to arrive at a pub, or you’re at a bus stop or train stop or whatever it might be, you do start to look at your phone, I think that’s changing now, I think you do go onto the BBC news website, so you’re starting to think, “Oh, I’ve got a few minutes, what can I do?” – the phone is the first place you go, and therefore there’s a bit more of an actual trigger to go, “Oh, I’ve got that blackjack game, I might give that a go again”, and spend some money on that, or play a few hands of blackjack, and I think that’s the key difference between sports betting and gaming, is that sports betting is a tool, at the end of the day, as I said before, I didn’t ever think that punters would move wholly over to mobile, I mean that really is a surprise to me, I envisaged that a sports better would put his mobile in his pocket and think, I’m OK, I’m going out but I can still place that bet. Saturday afternoon is our busiest time, it’s when you’re not at your PC, it’s when the matches are on, they’re starting, and you’re out with your wife, your girlfriend, whatever, with your kids in the park, it doesn’t matter, you’ve got your tool to still carry on placing your bet in your pocket. So much as betting is in that respect a form of entertainment, it’s more about taking the tool offline with you as it were, and carrying on being able to use it. Where casino games and game formats is very much about time filler – “What am I going to do for the next five minutes – play a game, OK, that sounds like a good idea”, but I need to get that message to the consumer, they need to be, you almost think, well they need to sit at a bus stop, look up, see a billboard saying, “Why not play now?”, and then start playing, and that’s the kind of mindset that we’ve got to get into.
RT: Finally, what innovations do you see in your area that are going to change the experience for users?
MW: I think touch screen is starting to make a huge difference. We spend a lot of time thinking about use cases, the flow of the application, to the point where our casino games, I can’t tell you how many hours we’ve sat there and worked out how you can play as many hands as you like of blackjack without moving a thumb off the fire button of the phone, literally you can sit there and just play, play, play, play, play, and that’s not just by saying “repeat that”, it’s by intelligently creating the logic around it that what you’re likely to want to do next is always the fire button. I think touch screen starts to change that slightly, it starts to mean you can do some more fun things for starters, so maybe when you deal cards in blackjack, you can flick them out of the deck using the slider on a screen, but just generally speaking I think, even if you take our sports book products, if you put our sports book products, our default sports book product, as it were, on a touch screen phone, it’s actually too small to use, so you need to kind of blow it up into thumb size, so that you can’t miss the button, because it’s very easy – when you’ve got a joystick navigation, we can control the navigation for you and highlight which bit you’re on and you just press fire and away you go, but when you’re using your thumb, you’re now reliant on a very unco-ordinated joystick, which is in the control of the user, that’s a big change for us, we’re starting to think through touch screen sports book navigation, and approaching it with a blank canvas rather than trying to reinvent what we’ve got already, recognising that it is a totally different interface, and the same, we haven’t done it yet, but we’re about to embark on that programme with games as well, because you almost get to the point where, while we’ve sussed out navigation for a fire button, and you’ve just got to keep pressing it, and the menus all sort of move around to accommodate your likely next step, and you just keep pressing assuming that you’ll accept the next step, that’s great, but when it’s touch screen, that becomes boring actually, because you just think, well hang on a minute, that’s not very interactive, yet I’m allowed to touch my screen, and all you’re doing is letting me touch one point continually, so you’ve almost got to make it not quite the opposite, but you’ve got to make it a bit more engaging in that the touch screen is part of the game play, and the same applies to know their bandwidth, because the better the bandwidth in a country or regional wherever, the more rich the internet experience becomes, and that’s great for the internet, but it makes the internet experience diabolical on a mobile handset. A lot of questions I got on the iPhone were, well, doesn’t that just make you redundant, because you can browse, the iPhone allows you to browse websites, so Ladbrokes can just have their website and the iPhone users can use it, and they’d just say to me, ever tried browsing a website on an iPhone? And they go, no, and well, here you go, have a look at this, and oh dear, this is rubbish, isn’t it? – I’ve got to scroll around and it doesn’t work, and then a few months later Apple launched the Apps Store, which has now become infamous, and everybody’s got an Apps Store, and starting pushing downloadable applications which were designed for a phone, nice big interface, simple to use, etc, so even they … and they stopped selling the iPhone on the back of being able to browse websites, they sold it on the back of having lots of mobile-specific applications, and that’s really where we come from, it’s like, yes, while you can browse a website on a phone, it’s not a very good experience, and you need to make it a very mobile-specific fast, easy to use experience for a mobile handset.
RT: Marcus, thank you very much for your time.
MW: Thank you.
RT: That was really insightful, and I’m sure our listeners are going to really enjoy it.