SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
On the back of 32Red‘s impressive six month results, announced earlier this week, SBC caight up with CEO Ed Ware to ask a few more questions about performance.
Can you provide any colour on the performance of 32RedSport? What are your ambitions for this channel?
It is very early days with the performance of 32Red Sport and I wouldn’t want to go into too much detail as we have only really soft launched the product. It is safe to say we will always be a casino-led business, that is our core and where we want to compete. However, we realise that our players also want to place sports bets so we wanted to offer our players something interesting and compelling and we believe we have that in our partnership with Kambi.
We have invested in some strategic partnerships such as horse racing sponsorship including the 32Red Cup on the last day of the Glorious Goodwood fixture, of course Rangers FC and we also hope to come to market with ways of making betting even more interesting in the latter part of the year.
Was the casino business at all impacted by the World Cup?
Our plan around the World Cup was always going to be to reduce our external marketing spend as we believed conversion would be difficult as sports led operators flooded the advertising market to try and recruit the mass market. We also thought that the consumer would be distracted by that huge event and less likely to engage with us. We therefore invested in our existing player base and developed a range of daily and topical promotions to keep players active at the casino. We were very happy with the results in June.
Have you been happy with progress in Italy at the moment? What are the positive changes you are waiting for?
We are happy with our investment in time, relationship building and spend in Italy. This is an important territory for the 32Red brand and we are working with people in the region to make advertising and marketing to Italian players more effective for us. The regulatory changes we look forward to are in relation to the announcements made by the large and credible software and content suppliers who say they are removing support of unlicensed operators in Italy by the end of this year.
What changes are you making ahead of the point of consumption licensing in the UK?
We are continually optimising our commercial and operational activities regardless of the potential introduction of POCT in the UK. We have made our position very clear on this in statements from the GBGA.
