Andrew Sharland – Fresh 8 Gaming – bringing innovation to igaming content

Mobile content optimisation start-up Fresh 8 Gaming, a finalist at this year’s Betting on Football Awards, aims to improve player acquisition by using dynamic advertising widgets combined with data and geo-location mapping in order to serve the viewer better targeted messaging with regards to igaming and sports betting products.

This week, Team SBC catches up with Andrew Sharland Managing Director and Co-Founder of Fresh 8 Gaming, to discuss his start-ups igaming ambitions, how content  and delivery are evolving for digital consumers and how the igaming industry should respond to these new demands.

SBC: Hi Andrew, great to interview you? Can you give our readers more insight into Fresh 8’s product range and services?

Andrew: Fresh8 Gaming is a mobile advertising company aimed specifically at the sports betting industry. Our platform utilises multiple data points to dynamically serve highly targeted ads that more efficiently acquire new customers and transactional ads that increase yield from existing customers.

Broadly speaking, the data points we use to serve our ads are:

1.  Content: What content is the user reading about – is it football, racing or tennis article etc (or not about sport at all which we’ve found is equally as valuable). We’ll then we drill down into what specifically into what the content is referring to i.e. it’s about the 15.20 race at Cheltenham or in the case of football, its primarily about Luis Suarez, his goal record in the lead up to Liverpool’s next game in the Premier League.
2. Geo-location: What country is the user in, right down to which city and soon postcode and what device are they on.
3. Data CRM research: What is the user’s relationship with the gambling operator – are they entirely new (never interacted with one of our ads), have they shown an interest in gambling previously and interacted with one of our ads or finally, are they an existing customer
4. Bet data: What live event and bet data is available from the gambling operator that we can populate an ad based on the above criteria

We then bring this altogether in matter of milliseconds and serve an ad that’s most likely to achieve the desired response from user. In the case of someone entirely new, we’ll try and get them clicking and interacting with the brand to give them an understanding of odds and the upside to depositing. If someone is continuous, we’ll then start introducing odds around events they’re reading about and the potential winnings of Luis Suarez scoring first in Liverpool’s next game for example – which we’ll wrap in an Promotional Signup Offer. Existing customers get a more traditional betting experience, but importantly they’re able to place a bet there and then without clicking out from the publisher. In this way, we make any content – betable.

SBC: Where do you envision your product fitting in the igaming arc, what difference can it make to media publishers wanting to generate igaming  advertising revenues  and igaming operators wanting to create new marketing channels.

Andrew: We see ourselves as a connector between audience and betting companies. For many gambling operators, display advertising has traditionally been more of a branding exercise – with high CPM’s driven by premium publishers and the lack of performance driven by generic, static banners.

We make it simple for publishers and gambling operators to do highly coupled integrations that would otherwise take time and resource from both sides of the fence (think Racing Post/ William Hill as an example).  Our platform can integrate any operator into any content site across mobile, tablet and desktop by just adding one line of code.

The kicker for publishers/affiliates is simple – value add every changing content for users that deliver superior performance around conversion and bet placement, higher yield from advertisers through tenancy and revenue share agreements. Operators benefit from reduced CPA fees as well increased retention and yield from registered customers who spend time consuming content on third party sites. Gambling operators can now make any site, a fully transactional betting site without having to get internal teams to do costly custom integrations that take time and money and as a result, often never happen.

SBC: How has content consumption changed with new technologies and new customer social habits entering the market.

Andrew: I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets by saying that mobile is the future and even now, accounts for a significant proportion of revenues. But customer acquisition strategies around mobile are still really in their infancy, despite it being the device consumers spend most time on.

Social acquisition strategies specifically around targeting on Facebook are working well for a number of operators. Two reasons – Facebook accounts for nearly 25% of time spent browsing on mobile alone (it’s provides scale in one place from the get go), but more interestingly, Facebook supplies huge amounts of user data to advertisers – age, friends, interests, geo. All things operators can use to make more informed decisions on which users to target and therefore make acquisition more effective.

Programmatic ad buying promises to deliver the scale and data advertisers can use to meet their business goals, whilst dispelling away with time consuming and often, wasteful CPM’s. Programmatic ad buying allows advertisers to buy access to users, on almost any website in the world, on a per impression basis via auctions played out in real time behind the scenes. The use of data in this space is where we bring extreme value to operators – does the user profile match a target demographic, can we provide relevance to the content the user is reading about and can we create something that brings about a valuable interaction, regardless of what device they’re on.

SBC: Looking at igaming partnerships with media publishers, do you feel that content strategy has been neglected by operators?

Andrew: In some respects, but it’s not core business for smaller operators who would rather focus budgets on the sharper end of hitting customer acquisition targets. Some of the larger operators do content sites, almost entirely for SEO purposes from what I can tell, but I love how Paddy Power are going above and beyond anything else I’ve seen and are now starting to produce content that pushes their brand values and get’s users coming back. I think operators have to be at a certain scale though to this work though, as content production can be an expensive overhead. Hence why we see most operators teaming up with publishers – large and small.

SBC: When creating your product what considerations and factors did your team have to take on board for its development?

Andrew: Really simple iterations based around hypotheses. We’re trying something entirely new, so it’s not as if we have a reference point to confirm our assumptions. For example, does context bring increased results from clicks and depositing customers, do existing customers see value in placing quick bets away from the operators’ site. We validated these assumptions very early – the results proved the model could scale and bring value to our customer base which is ultimately the operators, but also includes publishers and consumers as part of the value chain.

SBC: As a start up in the igaming and media market, what are your company’s next key phases?

Andrew: Commercially, we launched version 1 of the product with a top 5 operator last year. We’ve also been in stealth with another top 5 operator since January running across some seriously big content sites -running benchmarks and testing assumptions. Building out the technology in conjunction with these partners has been our absolute focus. We’ll be able to announce these partnerships shortly, as well as some brand new international partners, which should make some news!

From a product perspective, we want to use more data points at bigger scale – it’s massive technical challenge. I know what we can do with programmatic ad buying is going to make operators seriously excited. Retention is on the agenda of almost every operator in the UK. Everyone has large databases of customers but want ways to increase yield from their existing customer base. We will be able to run campaigns that target existing customers anywhere on the web at a specific time of day, in a specific part of the world, with a specific bet which they can transact there and then (or even what they’re reading about on the page). If operators can squeeze an extra 5-10% out of their existing customer base, the numbers quickly add up. Operators have all the data, they just need to put it to use.

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Andrew Sharland  Managing Director & Co-Founder Fresh 8 Gaming